In the essay, “Total Eclipse,” by Annie Dillard, the author writes about the experience of traveling to watch a total solar eclipse, and the subsequent feelings, contemplations, and reflections. Her husband accompanies her. There is an article about gold mining in the lobby of the hotel they check in to:

“In South Africa, in India, and in South Dakota, the gold mines extend so deeply into the Earth’s crust that they are hot. The rock wall’s burn the miners’ hands. The companies have to air-condition the mines; if the air conditioners break, the miners die. the elevators in the mine shafts run very slowly, and up, so the miner’ ears will not pop in their skulls. When the miners return to the surface, their faces are deathly pale.” (99)

The essay takes the form of swirling thought. As Dillard precedes to recount and process the experience, she is constantly circling back to the events and ideas she has already written, and reintegrating them. For example, the concept of gold mining returns multiple times and takes on metaphorical significance:

“We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust…We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add – until someone hauls their wealth up to the wide-awake city, in the form that people can use.” (106)

“The mind – the culture – has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our lives.” (107)

“What if you regain the surface and open your sack and find, instead of treasure, a beast which jumps at you. Or you may not come back at all. The winches jam, the scaffolding buckle, the air conditioning collapse.” (109)

Considering these passages in tandem, the metaphor of gold mining appropriately portrays the process of articulating raw human emotion and abstract ideas; the impulses, fears and wonders. We do this with the tools of language. Sometimes what we articulate is worthless, sometimes it is valuable to other people. Sometimes it reveals something about ourself we did not want to know. The articulating can even lead to the death of the miner; general self-destruction, or even madness and suicide.

The swirling form of this essay mirrors the circular thinking process. Often, insight is not discovered linearly. We chip away at a spot, move on, then return. The eclipse provides raw subjective material by changing the author’s environment visually and emotionally. It begs awareness of cosmic forces. She cites the onlookers’ unstifled hysteria. The eclipse is an extreme case of situational subjectivity, and so stands for the dimension of raw emotions and ideas as a whole. The chaotic form or the essay reflects Dillard trying to dig through the experience and find pure and concise meaning.

Broadly, this essay stands as an analogy of the essay writer’s task, as laid out by A. C. Benson in “The Art of the Essayist.” He believes the essayist must be an “interpreter of life, a critic of life,” wherein the word “life” can be defined as the “subjective,” the human and unique. (43)