First Blog Post

Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing” is a beautiful piece of writing. Dillard’s descriptions of the imagery were amazingly relatable and interesting, without being complicated.

I particularly liked the paragraph:

“At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud. I saw one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness; then the waters closed, and the lights went out.”

I found the imagery of this paragraph intriguing. Based off of my own experience of being outside at night, as I read this, I can imagine the intense darkness surrounding Dillard as she looks at the last light reflected off of the cloud. The line “a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China” struck me; I had never even considered the idea before that a cloud could still have color because it was so high up that it was reflecting sunlight from the other side of the world.

The next line, “a sudden enormous black body arced over the water” provides a vivid image of some unknown creature emerging from the water, which gives me a chilling feeling when I read it. Saying “a sudden enormous black body” is much more effective than saying something like “suddenly a huge, dark fish emerged from the water” - an “enormous black body” adds the element of the unknown that the author is experiencing. I also think that making the black body sudden, rather than saying “suddenly a black body arced,” adds something that makes the writing more engaging, possibly because it eliminates an adverb. This part of the paragraph is also particularly striking because the creature (I think it’s a fish) comes out of the violet of the cloud’s reflection in the water. The juxtaposition of the calmness of the cloud floating high enough in the sky to reflect light from China with a dark creature breaking the surface of the water communicates an element of surprise to the reader.

This paragraph also employs some very nice “active verbs” like we talked about in class - particularly the words “glowed,” “arced,” “fling,” and “dive.” The underbelly of the violet cloud “glowing” creates a calm, warm image, which contrasts with the eerie darkness of the rest of the paragraph. “Arced” is very descriptive on its own, and I can’t think of another way to portray such an image. “Fling” was interesting because even though Dillard doesn’t explicitly describe what was flung, it still creates a relatable image for the reader - I imagine a fish doing that thing fish do when they jump out of the water. I guess “fling” is the only good way to describe it. “Dive” suggests a deliberate action, in contrast to a fall.

It’s not easy to figure out how she does it, but somehow Annie Dillard can describe her experiences by expertly constructing a scene for the reader to participate in, rather than just telling the reader what she saw and did.