Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

The final essay of Dillard’s collection addresses a variety of themes, including aging and the loss of childhood. Dillard writes that she visits a cabin with an unnamed child who is nine years old. Dillard never gives the child’s name or spells out their relationship to one another, but clues within the text suggest that the child is Dillard’s younger self. Though Dillard writes about moments in which she seems to interact with the child, such as when she fixes up the bike found under the porch so the child can ride it, these interactions can also be seen as symbolic: Dillard spends the weekend at the cottage to allow her inner child to dictate her actions and how to pass the time. Rather than working or reading, Dillard’s inner child sees the bike and demands that “she wants to ride it” (169), so Dillard obliges.

Dillard’s interactions with the child also seem to suggest that Dillard uses her time at the cottage attempting to remember what it was like to be young, though as time passes, she finds it increasingly difficult to do. Dillard references a child of nine who vows to herself to never become a grownup and let the child she is in that moment die: “When she changed, where will that other person have gone? Could anyone keep her alive, this person here on the street and her passions?” (172). For Dillard to know what this child promised to herself on that day suggests that this child is a younger incarnation of Dillard, and this child of Dillard’s memory has many things in common with the child in the cottage. Both vow undying crushes on boys from their school, both would rather be out playing and exploring than reading or talking, and both have a strong sense of self. Dillard’s vow to herself as a child, then, translates into this trip to the cottage and her attempt to pay tribute to her former self, so the “unthinkable adult” that she has become will not forget what she used to be (172). Dillard allows herself to remember what it was like to be a child, to embrace those impulses, and to honor her old feelings and fears.

However, Dillard also shows that no matter how much she admires and misses her old self, she has changed into what she used to dread. Dillard’s younger self vows to hate her sister, yet later Dillard writes that they will visit her sister on the way home from the cabin: “my sister, whom I love” (186). Similarly, Dillard’s younger self swears to “never, not I, sit and drink and smoke and do nothing but talk” (172-73). Later in the text, Dillard sits and has a long chat with her neighbor, Noah Very, while the child stares into the windowpane, looking at visions of her future. The child then looks at Dillard's reflection: “just me, a woman in her thirties, drinking sherry and smoking a cigarette” (185). Though Dillard’s younger self promised to never sit around like an adult and drink and smoke and talk, Dillard pointedly shows her adult self doing both things, and seemingly enjoying them. Dillard looks back fondly on the girl she was, but she is no longer that same person with the same ideas and values. As such, Dillard’s childhood fears about “the certain loss of self and all she held dear” have in some ways come true (172).

The title of this essay, “Aces of Eights,” refers to a hand in poker called a “dead man’s hand” (171), nicknamed because Jesse James drew this hand before being shot in the back. When Dillard plays cards with the child, the child draws this same hand, indicating that she, too, is doomed to metaphorically die. The girl who once was, no matter how vividly she may exist in Dillard’s memory, lives no more, and Dillard regrets that she has symbolically killed her by growing up. 

Another underlying theme of the essay is nostalgia and memory. Dillard bemoans the difficulty of remembering things as they are and not as she wished them to be. From the beginning of the essay, Dillard writes that she worries about going to the cottage because she will be distracted by “some dim picture of our own selves as figures side by side on the riverbank, as figures in our own future memories, as focal points for some absurd, manufactured nostalgia” (161). Dillard struggles to live in the moment, rather than creating forced memories, such as when she and the child send candles floating down the river. Dillard wonders, “Why, when we were actually seeing the candles wobble down the river, did I think, this should be better? [...] As a memory, however, it is already looking good” (168). With this example, Dillard points to the way that we often attempt to control our experiences in life, rather than allowing them to be what they are.

Memory and nostalgia are both manipulative and easy to manipulate, masking what is in favor of what should be. When Dillard visits her neighbor, Noah Very, he offers another example, describing a time when he watched his children playing outside: “I said to myself, ‘Noah, now you remember this sight, the children being so young and together and playing by the river this particular morning. You remember it.’ And I remember it as if it happened this morning” (183). However, Noah also confesses that he remembers little else from the time that followed; he has successfully constructed a perfect memory of his children’s childhood, but at the expense of pushing out other, less idyllic moments.