Annie Dillard's 'Seeing'

While reading Annie Dillard’s Seeing, I experienced countless moments when I would have to just pause, and process the sheer amount of imagery that rushed past my mind’s eye. Dillard successfully touches upon what we see, what we don’t see, how we see and even how those who can’t see, see. Though numerous instances from her piece gripped my imagination, the part that stood out to me the most was when she talks about blindness through various tidbits from a variety of people.  She writes about the newly-sighted, “It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable.” Her description of the world as “something touchingly manageable” from the perspective of the newly-sighted people made me really wonder about how vastly strange must it be for these people to see. The world’s size seems unfathomable enough to people who can see, so how supremely overwhelming must it be for them, given their entirely different expectations of “the world”? Dillard continues, “It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent.” Again, this got me thinking about how we fret about our outward appearances and worry about how others see us. On the other hand, the newly sighted had not even been provided with that opportunity until now to begin with. During our discussions in class, we noticed how Annie Dillard deftly uses action verbs, gets her point across without any lavish adjectives, and yet takes the reader on a surreal imagery roller-coaster, without having to resort to clichés. Funnily, the sentences that I picked, contain quite a few adverbs and describing words. This is an example of a rare instance wherein Dillard makes use of just the appropriate number of literary tools with adverbs like “touchingly” and “unattractively”, capturing the very essence of her point. The repetition of the phrase “It oppresses them to realize” in both the sentences enables the reader to completely focus on the true, miserable discomfort that the newly-sighted experience. Dillard truly has a brilliant way of transporting the reader to her world, a world where she paints exactly what she wants the reader to see.