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- Dillard compares the Catholic church she attends with an expedition to the pole. Why does she do this? What point is she trying to make with her analogy?
An Expedition to the Pole
Does this essay discuss the meaning in life and the natural world?
Is this a lyrical essay?
Is this essay about a place that the author has been and what meaning she has constructed out of her experiences and the experiences of others who have travelled there before her?
Does this essay contemplates the workings of God, the universe and the purpose and direction of life?
'An Expedition to the Pole' is the longest chapter and the crux of the book. Here she details the first polar expeditions that were set out for the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility.
The chapter alternates between three main parts:
The Land, which gives the history of the Polar explorers and the description of her own expedition to the Pole;
The People, which describes the rituals of her Catholic church;
The Technology, which includes the facts about what science and knowledge was available to the explorers.
It also contemplates how people use what they have whether it be in the material, mental or the spiritual realm.
At the end of the chapter, Dillard imaginatively moves herself and the people of the church to the Polar landscape in a wild scene that acts as a metaphor for how church goers seek the same thing that the Polar explorers were seeking: something pure and inaccessible. Find quotations to support this.
Dillard describes the purpose for all her own expeditions. “It is for the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility I am searching, and have been searching, in the mountains and along the seacoasts for years.” What do you think Dillard means by this?
She considers the planet “a sojourner in airless space, a wet ball flung across nowhere.” Twice in the book she recalls reading that “our solar system as a whole is careering through space toward a point east of Hercules.” She compares this idea to humanity being cast out with no clear destination, like Adam and Eve from Eden. If you don't know the story of Adam and Eve, research this. This same idea is explored in the title chapter, “Teaching a Stone to Talk.” She tells the story of a man who is trying to make his pet rock speak. She concludes that his experiment exemplifies the human desire to hear the voice of God, and assuage our fear of being alone with our own thoughts and without direction or clear destination. She asks, “What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us?” She decides to quit hiding, “pray without ceasing,” and resolves that “silence is all there is.”
Annie Dillard uses symbolism and metaphysical images to portray her thoughts on religion. Descriptions combined with the narration of the absurd are effectively used even without informing the reader that her material departs from their own expectations of what is real. Dillard’s use of language and her gift for pulling seeming random thoughts into the metaphors of her storyline makes it strong. She expertly blends facts into her narrative and reflections and deftly compares two or three things at once to provide layers of metaphor. Dillard’s lyrical descriptions are done with a series of short declarative sentences that roll into longer ones to add breath. There are often multiple comparisons made of an object or a place as if she is turning it around in her mind and describing it from different vantage points. After her experience seeing the eclipse, she goes to a restaurant that becomes “a halfway house, a decompression chamber.” She expresses her thoughts as if they rush through her mind and transform into images. The pattern of her writing makes her descriptions immediate, sharp and individual.
Find evidence to support the statements made about language, metaphysical conceits and Dillard's style.
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CONCEIT
Definition:A literary and rhetorical term for an elaborate or strained figure of speech, usually a metaphor or simile.
Originally used as a synonym for "idea" or "concept," conceit refers to a particularly fanciful figurative device that's intended to surprise and delight readers by its cleverness and wit. Carried to extremes, a conceit may instead serve to perplex and annoy.
conceit,
in literature, fanciful or unusual image in which apparently dissimilar things are shown to have a relationship. The Elizabethan poets were fond of Petrarchan conceits, which were conventional comparisons, imitated from the love songs of Petrarch, in which the beloved was compared to a flower, a garden, or the like. The device was also used by the metaphysical poets, who fashioned conceits that were witty, complex, intellectual, and often startling, e.g., John Donne's comparison of two souls with two bullets in "The Dissolution." Samuel Johnson disapproved of such strained metaphors, declaring that in the conceit "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together." Such modern poets as Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot have used conceits.
metaphysical poets,
name given to a group of English lyric poets of the 17th cent. The term was first used by Samuel Johnson (1744). The hallmark of their poetry is the metaphysical conceit (a figure of speech that employs unusual and paradoxical images), a reliance on intellectual wit, learned imagery, and subtle argument. Although this method was by no means new, these men infused new life into English poetry by the freshness and originality of their approach. The most important metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell. Their work has considerably influenced the poetry of the 20th cent.