Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Dillard opens the essay by writing that looking through lenses is something “[y]ou get used to” and that it’s an “acquired skill” (107). Dillard describes learning to look through a microscope, learning how to focus, how to maneuver the machine, and how to see “through one eye, with both eyes open” (107). Dillard remembers a child’s microscope she owned as a girl and her joy in collecting pond water and watching algae, rotifers, amoebae, and daphniae. The five-watt bulb on her microscope broke, so Dillard used a 75-watt bulb, not knowing the damage it might do to her eyesight and the intense heat it put on her samples. Dillard recalls liking watching the pond water evaporate and the microscopic “members of a very dense population” die off (108).

Dillard then confesses this is all a prelude to discussing swans. At Daleville Pond, Dillard watches a pair of whistling swans through her binoculars. The swans have been “flushed” by Dillard and fly and circle the pond as she watches on. Dillard finds that through the lenses of the binoculars, she loses sense of space, not knowing which direction she faces, entranced “in that circle of light, in great speed and utter silence” (111).