50 pages • 1 hour read
Annie DillardTeaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay 12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 12: “Mirages”
Essay 12 Summary
Dillard notes how mirages abound over the summer in Puget Sound, connecting this fact to her belief that the season of summer feels like a mirage itself, “a passive dream of pleasure, itself untrue” (149). During the winter, it is dark and cold, and the beaches are empty. Dillard sees only one other house lit up on the beach, miles away: “In the winter there is nobody, nothing. If you see a human figure, or a boat on the water, you grab binoculars” (149). By contrast, summers on the beach are populated by people, birds, and boats; people play volleyball, eat fresh clams, and enjoy the sun. Dillard compares this fleeting pleasure to mirages: “It vanishes like any fun, and the empty winds resume (150).
The mirages that Dillard witnesses in Washington seem to distort the world around them, like “a hall of mirrors rimmed by a horizon holey and warped” (150). Dillard explains that mirages are hard to see, since the mind will automatically fill in gaps of things that don’t make sense. Mirages photograph well and are enhanced by looking at them through lenses such as binoculars or telescopes. Dillard recalls standing on the beach and watching boats expand, elongate, and distort. As she watches, the water also begins to alter, with the smooth water becoming “seemingly jagged and rucked as Appalachians, as enormous stairways, pleated into long lines of sixty-foot ridges and valleys” (152). Gradually the water and the ships return to their normal proportions, “and the water closed over them in the way that water has always closed over everything, in literature, and in fact: as if they had never been” (153).
Essay 12 Analysis
In this essay, Dillard subtly points to the overlap of what is “real” and what is illusion. Dillard does so by comparing the concept of a mirage with the fleeting summers of Puget Sound. By most measures, the season of summer and the experiences that Dillard describes occurring on the beach would be categorized as real, though Dillard notes their transient quality: “This is the life of the senses, the life of pleasure. It is mirage on the half shell” (150).
Dillard goes on to detail the phenomenon of mirage and to describe some mirages that she herself has witnessed. In contrast to summer, most people would categorize a mirage as something imagined, not something real. However, Dillard describes the mirages she witnesses in terms that suggest they are events happening as she sees them, not events that have been fantasized or fictionalized: “In the north the little cruisers I had watched now steered from the canyons and found regular waters, which looked mighty dull [...] gradually, over the space of an hour, the mountains sank back to the water” (154). By doing so, Dillard implies that these mirages are no less real because they are optical illusions; what she saw became real by nature of her having seen it.
In this essay and others, Dillard describes events that others might attempt to explain away using laws of science, physics, or psychology. Though Dillard also studies science and offers a description for the way mirages work (on pages 150-51), she resists attempting to explain away the almost supernatural encounters she has. In doing so, Dillard leaves open many possibilities, encouraging people to think more carefully about the nature of reality and illusion.
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By Annie Dillard
