Annie Dillard is a Liar
Foreword
The ability to accept life as it unfolds has become a quiet act of courage - certainly, now that we’re facing a world filled with disappointments, unmet expectations, and unsettling realities. This essay, “Annie Dillard is a Liar,” emerges from the struggle between our longing for the ideal and the often-harsh truths of what is. Whether it’s the quest for a perfect experience or the urge to shield ourselves from discomfort, we’re confronted by the need to surrender to the way things are—not as a form of resignation but as a path to real peace.
Today, we face a political climate and a societal landscape that feel far removed from the world many of us may have imagined. But just as Katie’s story teaches, the opportunity for transcendence—true engagement with life—lies in embracing our reality fully. The essay reminds us that it’s only when we stop fighting what’s before us, and start truly seeing it, that we find the strength to make something meaningful out of what is. In a time when it’s tempting to turn away, this piece invites us to lean in, to witness the beauty in even the most unexpected places, and to remember that the present, however flawed, remains our most powerful starting point.
-Brian Piñon
Annie Dillard is a Liar
Katie Shaw Thompson
“I see no platinum grass,” my mom declared. “Annie Dillard is a liar.”
Sitting in my sister’s house in Rochester, NY that morning, preparing for the life-altering experience of being a living breathing human being in the path of solar eclipse totality, I had, like the insufferable nerd that I am, read aloud select passages from Annie Dillard’s description of experiencing the 1979 total solar eclipse from her lauded Teaching a Stone to Talk. My mother, my sister, and my husband at turns indulged and mocked me as I gushed over Dillard’s lucious description of a world dipped into colors “never seen on earth,” an experience so transcendent that “only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time.”
I had driven twelve hours from Elgin, IL to Rochester, NY to watch this spectacle. More than two years before I had informed my sister that I would be invading her house on this date for this purpose and invited my mother as well. As a nurse and a retired science teacher respectively, they seemed to choose to find my enthusiastic amateur interest in this astronomical event amusing. I had always intended to pull my two grade school age children from classes for the trip, and I was elated when my husband eventually elected to join us and do the majority of the driving.
In 2017, after the last eclipse passed over my house at 80% totality, I resolved to fully experience the next one. It was not as though nothing happened in my front yard in Elgin, IL. The sky darkened. The birds quieted. Shadows grew eerie and long. The crickets heightened their song. I stood on my brick walkway and explained as best I could to my four and two year old what was happening – why the world was so strange. While they soon lost interest and tottered off into the grass to follow grasshoppers and fill the sidewalk with chalk, I was mesmerized by an earth gone sideways from the one I knew - yet not quite so dramatic as the change described in Dillard’s essay haunting my mind. Later, I watched on YouTube as intergenerational crowds tore off their eclipse glasses and gazed in wonder at the moon overtaking the sun. I ached to be part of that festival - to experience such a unique moment in time.
I know many words have been poured out over the human experience that is the fear of missing out, and certainly I was experiencing that. But I also know I am often willing to pay a high price for experiences that hold the potential to pierce the veil of space and time as we ordinarily know it. In my twenties, for example, I was one of those women who chose no painkillers to give birth to either child. I did it from a perspective of not wanting to harm myself or my children. My midwife assured me this was the right path to take. I know at forty that logic would not sway me today, if I were to ever get pregnant again, which is no longer a possibility I entertain except with horror. It was the worst pain I had ever experienced. I struggle to describe it to anyone who inquires, it is so beyond the scope of my life otherwise. I just remember the midwife told me that there would be a time when I would declare –ludicrously, since it was in no way possible– that I “want to go home now.” I laughed at her until those very words escaped my mouth. I would have done anything to make that pain stop but by then it was nearly over. And what made it all worth it was what happened next. Both times, through the pain, just as these creatures made their triumphant entry into the world, I felt I touched all the sunrises and all the sunsets that had ever been all at once. Though I have spent endless hours in church, I cannot say I have ever experienced such a moment of touching the limitless as I did in those moments of bringing new life screaming into the world. I understand why women give birth on ayahuasca. I have total respect for women who endure any manner of childbearing and all the possible horrors that stalk it from beginning to end. And who can say that what I experienced was not a direct result of the pain overwriting a part of my brain. All I can say is I know I am the kind of woman who would pay a high price to live through unique moments of reality-bending but all too real human experiences.
Yet, at coffee on the Friday before when my friends reminded me that the city we called home would experience 94% totality, I began to question my decisions. Why was I spending all that time, gas, and energy for a less than guaranteed and un-quantifiable outcome? On the way to New York, a dear friend from Pennsylvania texted that he would not be making the drive to Rochester to join us since he would see it from his own home at 95% totality. Wasn't that enough?
We arrived in New York the day before and experienced a beautiful –even balmy– weather day for this part of the world at this time of season. We stopped our car to peer over breathtaking views of Lake Erie, spilling on for miles. In the cliff side meadow that lay between the car and the great lake, vultures were visible dancing on thermals high above. Even in the early evening sitting around the campfire at my sister's house, we enjoyed the colorful, clearly setting sun.
But by morning on the day of the eclipse, the sky had grown partly cloudy. The group of us nodded to each other over our cups of steaming beverages that these wisps were unfortunate but would surely not ruin our experience. We counted down the hours to totality around my sister's kitchen table, alternately sharing snippets of educational eclipse factoids from our phones and peering out the windows as the clouds kept slowly encroaching. By the time we were setting out the lawn chairs on the driveway, the sky had made its intentions known to us: full cloud cover without a spot of visible sky.
We trekked to the front yard with eclipse glasses in hand, pulling the reluctant children with us. What was there to see? Well, we explained, nothing necessarily. It was clear to all of us that there would be no platinum grass, no sepia experience, no Annie Dillard described ecstasy.
My sister began to apologize– no doubt aware of my investment of time and energy spent to experience this moment with her in her front yard now ostensibly wasted. But there was no gap in her hospitality and no way for her to control those clouds convening above us.
From down the street, my brother-in-law’s best friend and wife came tumbling along with beverages and a wagon of toddlers in tow – all complaining. They had taken off work for this. My sister scrambled inside to find something to entertain all the children. She had brought them all instruments from a trip to Costa Rica it turned out. Wooden flutes and three different kinds of percussion instruments were produced to each child’s great delight.
While the children squealed and the adults bemoaned their luck, the world around us did begin to get a bit dimmer. Meanwhile, texts started coming in from my best friend, Brian, in my hometown. He was taking breathtaking photos from his own front yard – a mere five minute drive from my house– of the moon beginning to eat the sun.
From Texas, my husband’s middle brother texted the Thompson family group thread to brag about his perfect views. Why hadn’t we all flown there?
By this time the nighttime sensing lights had come on next door and across the suburban neighborhood folks could be seen holding court in their yards, arms crossed, seeing what there was to be seen. Then I noticed the birds that had been singing all day despite the clouds had gone completely silent. That’s when the eeriness set in. Something really wrong was happening. It was the middle of the day and we were immersed in pitch black even if we had no sight line on the cosmic event causing it all. This was totality, my husband, Parker, announced, looking up from his phone. As if on cue the children raised their performance levels to that of a symphony in a ritual in some other time and some other place. It was not at all the soundtrack or the scene I expected but I found I had to remind myself how gravity worked for a moment. I felt unmoored to the way things were supposed to be. I caught myself grinning then as broadly as I ever had as a child watching the climax of a fourth of July fireworks display.
Still their friend from down the street complained. Still my sister apologized. Still Brian texted perfect pictures of 94% totality from Illinois, expertly taken from his phone. Suddenly, I started and could not stop quietly laughing.
No. This was not the experience I had drooled over that Annie Dillard had partaken of decades before on a California hillside. But it was never really going to be; was it? Every moment is its own. And we have so very little control over so very much of how things go. That’s what amused me the most: the realization of how tiny I was in that moment. I found it entirely wonderful and freeing. Neither my years of planning this moment nor my hours of driving – not even my extensive reading and research – gave me any control over the sky.
No. The thing I had the most control over in that moment was how I would meet it–whether I would be present to what was. It would not be what I would have made it if I had a magic wand. But it was still beautiful and transcendent, standing there with so many people I loved, listening to a homemade soundtrack of chaos while the world turned entirely weird.
So many times in life I have tried to hide from what was. I have tried to push away pain, grief, anger, and fear. It’s so often too much to bear. It would be much more convenient if my inner emotional weather was always calm and fair. But of course it’s not. And I have found that my trying to make my inner forecast clear when it’s not has rarely done me any favors. More often it has only caused me more harm to pretend that anything in my life is anything but just what it is – even if it’s painful. I have tried to work away my uncomfortable feelings. I have tried drinking them away, eating them away, and starving them away, too. While I now have more compassion for the times when I wasn’t strong enough to feel all the hard things I sometimes feel, I also now know through all that trial and error that none of those things actually make those damn feelings go away. In my experience, pushing away what is only pushes away the opportunity to experience the transcendent in any given moment.
Because the transcendent really is all around us – or at least the opportunity to experience it is. If we let ourselves be present to whatever is, be it pain or joy or anything in between, we can often touch that timeless timelessness in spite of or even because of the moment’s less than perfect conditions.
Drawing breath is eerie and weird if we get right down to it. I can explain how this oxygen keeps me alive but that does not diminish my awe of the process when I stop to consider it. That’s the thing though, considering it, letting the realness of it wash over me. And letting the realness of everything wash over me as often as I can is how I want to live. I don’t want to get used to it. Because I don’t know whether Annie Dillard embellished her dance with time and awe but I know there was something true in what she wrote even if I did not have her exact experience. Because the price to pay in order to touch those moments is not necessarily a twelve hour drive or even great physical pain. The price is simply to let ourselves be as real as we can, come what may. And though some days it is harder than others, that is a price I want to willingly pay over and over again.
Join Us by the Fire: Share Your Thoughts.
You had me at the Title, Font and Illustration. Your words pulled me in and in the end left me with a better headspace. Thank you 💕