Post Number One: Annie Dillard's Essay "Seeing"

Annie Dillard's essay "Seeing" is very effective at using symbolism and imagery to describe what it means to truly see something through an analytical lens. Throughout her essay, she describes the different ways of seeing among people as well as things that humans generally don't think about or see. On page four, third paragraph, Dillard describes the things she feels and doesn't feel after visiting a waterfront location. As she lays in bed, she describes feeling herself in a "whirling darkness," though she's not entirely sure why. She goes on to say that it could be because she is travelling at incredibly large speeds as the Earth spins and orbits the sun, but she cannot really feel the intense 64,800 miles per hour acting on her; she is aware that she cannot feel the force of the orbit on her while she is on Earth, and that raises the questions: what else can humans feel and not feel in everyday life, and what can humans see and not see in the same context? She can feel the force of gravity on her from the Earth, though not from the various planets pulling on her in the "unhinged merry-go-round" that is the solar system. To understand any of this, Dillard proposes that humans must think with an open and imaginative mind in order to interpret the invisible forces and objects of the universe. When she opens her eyes she sees the flatness that is reality through her noninterpretive eyes; when she closes them, she sees the universe unfold before her, seeing "...stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone." There's quite a lot of beauty in Dillard's proposition of truly seeing: though she is in action blinding herself, she opens her mind to think of the things she knows exist but she will never see. If she were to look to the sky with her eyes, she would see a landscape of stars sprawled out across the sky. If she were to close her eyes and think of the sky, she could go far beyond the limitations of the Earth. She could imagine the galaxies that litter the universe throughout its emptiness, the planets that fill such galaxies, and the stars and star clusters that fill the empty space of the ever expanding universe. If we truly desire to see what we cannot normally, we need to temporarily displace ourselves from reality as Dillard did. The only way to see and feel what is invisible or otherwise unseeable is to cut off our two-dimensional way of seeing and enter the realm of possibility that is in our minds.