Dillard's Wack

Honestly Annie Dillard seems like a weirdo from this essay. Her detail was almost too much, and hard to believe seeing as how she wrote it years after the fact. And who the heck would scream and be terrified of an eclipse? I can remember back to elementary school when I got to see an eclipse, though it wasn't a full one but pretty darn close, it was so amazingly beautiful that even at such a young age I knew how special it was for me to be experiencing this phenomenon. My dad and I sat outside by our bird Fred's cage with our makeshift eclipse glasses, the world around us changed from a lush green to dark orange almost as if we were driving through a fire where the smoke covers the sun making everything hazy gray orange. Nothing to scream about, yes awesome, but terrifying not even close. Then again it might be because of my love and obsession of the sky and everything entrapped in the vast unknown such as: birds, stars, moons, planets and yes the most important of them all aliens. The eclipse that I was present for brought me closer to the extra-terrestrial lives that I know are out there. Haha ok enough of that.

Dillards piece was just a little to much nonsense. She seems to skip over the entertainment factor for me, and falls under a more negative tone. This essay seemed to be more about the fear of dying than anything else. Her obsession with dying took over and distracted me from the eclipse. When the story finally started to pick up was when she heard the college guy talking about how the ring that she was so afraid of looked like a "life-saver." How ironic that she thought it symbolized death, and yet this kid who saw the same eclipse had a completely different outlook and saw life in it! And not just life, but a life-Saver!

And though this essay is not just about the eclipse and seems to be more about the experience of remembrance, she--for my own taste--took it overboard. I enjoy memory and remembering experiences that were magical and made an impression on me, but there is a line, and she crossed it.

~L.