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 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 2: “An Expedition to the Pole”
Essay 2, Part 1 Summary
Dillard describes a singing group that performs during the Catholic mass she attends. At first, Dillard resents the group since she joined Catholicism “solely to escape Protestant guitars” (23), but she acknowledges that many different people are on the journey to find “the sublime.” Dillard references the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility, an imaginary location the most distance from land in any direction in the Arctic Ocean. Dillard likens this concept to the “Absolute,” which is “that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions” (23). It takes a lot of trouble to try to find it, but it is also enormously valuable, which is why people try. Dillard has been attending mass at the same Catholic church for a year, an experience she compares to running away from home to join the circus. She describes some of the glitches that occur during the service, such as the trouble with the opening hymn and the communion wafers getting stuck together. However, Dillard believes that part of the miracle of church is that God overlooks people’s humanity in their attempt to reach the divine.
Interspersed with these accounts of the church, Dillard describes 19th-century polar expeditions in which crews often found themselves stuck in the ice. Eventually, many explorers were driven to set out across the ice on foot to search for help, and they would sometimes drift on floes broken off from the ice. Dillard recounts the great dignity these explorers possessed in the face of almost certain death. One exploration, the Franklin Expedition, baffles modern-day historians because of the seemingly meaningless things members took along with them, such as a library, a hand-organ, and fine china and silverware. Dillard notes, “They man-hauled their sweet human absurdity to the Poles” (36). The men viewed the stark, harsh conditions and landscape as beautiful but deadly, though necessary to approach the sublime. Dillard compares this view to her experiences in church, attempting to approach divinity. Dillard realizes that her personal discomfort is simply an impediment to reaching God: “You do not have to do these things—unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him” (38).
Essay 2, Part 2 Summary
Though some progress is made spiritually and physically, Dillard notes that obstacles can arise to throw people off course. In the polar expeditions, these obstacles could range from hypothermia to frozen limbs to carbon monoxide poisoning. Dillard describes various explorers who met disastrous ends, some of whom disappeared and were never found. Modern-day polar explorations often fail to understand the danger of these earlier exploits, with people going on a lark to take pictures with penguins. Dillard notes that churchgoers often seem “like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute” (48). However, she believes the search for God is fraught with danger and should be treated as such, since invoking God risks also invoking his wrath.
Essay 2, Part 3 Summary
Dillard recounts visiting the Arctic and being amazed by the “colorless stripes” that make it impossible to tell where land, sea, and sky begin and end (51). Dillard loses sense of time in the Arctic, since the sun never sets or appears, so she lives by a schedule of when her body demands sleep or food. Dillard has been metaphorically searching for the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility for years, and she notes that many of her expeditions have been unsuccessful. She describes some of the great findings from the 19th century, such as John Murray’s use of dredgings and soundings to deduce the size and shape of the Antarctic continent. Drift expeditions, in which crews deliberately became frozen in the ice to drift along, occurred into the early 20th century.
Dillard sets out again on her symbolic journey, describing breaking off on floes, encountering clowns and priests, and seeing things that hearken back to some of the polar expeditions she has read about. She encounters Christ, taking snapshots with humans as if they are penguins. Dillard begins playing a tambourine along with the band she mocked at the beginning of the essay, noting that her enthusiasm drives some people away. Nonetheless, she thinks it is worthwhile: “But how can any of us tone it down? For we are nearing the Pole” (64).
Essay 2 Analysis
Dillard intersperses her experience at Catholic mass with a history of polar exploration, comparing the relative challenges of each in the attempt to reach the sublime. Dillard compares the Arctic explorers to religious explorers who must step out into the unknown with no guarantee of success and a great chance of failure. Though Dillard is often put off by the human aspect of religious worship, she acknowledges that, like the 19th-century expeditions, one must rely on one’s crew to survive the harsh conditions of life: “There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer, fine as the conception is” (33). Dillard describes some of the habits of the 19th-century Arctic explorers that may seem ridiculous from a 21st-century perspective, such as not taking overcoats or insisting on bringing fine china and silverware. However, Dillard also notes that on a spiritual journey, many of us are just as unwilling to give up worldly goods and ideals that have no eternal value. She notes that we must find “workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us” (36). The soul is eternal, wise, and profound, but the body is weak, greedy, and often silly, and like the harsh conditions of the Arctic, it is what we must overcome to draw close to the unreachable.
Dillard breaks up each section under multiple subheadings that repeat throughout—The People, The Land, and The Technology—indicating that these three categories are imperative to understanding the two different types of expedition. The People references those who are involved in the two different types of journeys, whether priests, parishioners, Dillard herself, or 19th-century captains and crews. The Technology explains the tools used by these respective groups to attempt to reach the sublime: for example, ships and survival gear (or lack thereof) versus communion wafers and shoddy bands. The Land describes the goal attempting to be attained through this journey, such as the bleak but beautiful polar tundra or the experience of sitting through mass to commune with God. In the second part of the essay, Dillard adds in the subhead Assorted Wildlife, referring to creatures encountered in Arctic expeditions and everyday life, as well as humans in their often-bungled attempts to reach God.
Most of Parts 1 and 2 of the essay seem grounded in reality, interspersing Dillard’s experiences in church and accounts from 19th-century Arctic expeditions. In Part 3, however, Dillard’s description of her journey becomes more surreal and symbolic. Dillard introduces this shift first by describing the disorientation she experienced during her own travels to the Arctic, unable to distinguish the hours of the day or any discernible differences in the color of land, sea, and sky. Dillard then creates a sort of disorientation for the reader in her absurdist description of traveling through the Arctic with clowns, Christ, priests, and 19th-century crewmen.
Earlier in the essay, Dillard noted the absurdity of modern-day worship, and here she embraces this concept whole-heartedly, intertwining events from her own experiences at church with incidents described in polar explorations with imagined, symbolic scenarios. Dillard implies that to reach the divine, one must abandon pretenses of reality and embrace the strange, the human, and the absurd. Though at the beginning of the essay, Dillard scoffs at the band that comes to play at mass, at the end she shows herself enthusiastically “banging the tambourine and belting the song so loudly that people are edging away” (64). Dillard realizes that her own reservations are holding her back; to approach the unapproachable, she must throw herself into the journey with all her might.
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