50 pages • 1 hour read
Annie DillardTeaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 3: “Living Like Weasels”
Essay 3 Summary
Dillard describes the instincts and patterns of a wild weasel—how it hunts and clamps onto its prey without letting go. She recounts Ernest Thompson Seton’s story of an eagle shot out of the sky with a weasel’s skull embedded in its throat. Dillard encounters a weasel at a local pond near her home in Virginia. She sits at the water’s edge, observing nature, when, “inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me” (65). Both Dillard and the weasel are stunned into silence at the sight of the other, their gazes locked together, until the weasel abruptly runs away. Dillard knows it sounds unbelievable, but she posits, “I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine” (67).
Dillard welcomes the experience, since she came to Hollins Pond “not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it” (67). Dillard believes that we shouldn’t strictly live like weasels, hunting like them and walking like them and so forth, but that humans could learn “something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive” (67). Dillard wishes she had clamped onto the weasel’s throat and could live as a weasel does. She believes people could learn to live as freely and as wildly as weasels, “to grasp your one necessity and not let it go” (69).
Essay 3 Analysis
In Essay 3, Dillard has a unique encounter in which she locks eyes with a weasel and believes that their minds briefly connect. Weasels are often referenced in fables and literature as sneaky and untrustworthy, with their name even being used as a term to describe a conniving human; however, Dillard finds something beautiful and honest about the weasel’s tenacity and its bloodthirsty, single-minded pursuit of its prey. Though she doesn’t give specific details, Dillard hints that she has been struggling to understand how to best live her life. Dillard begins to spend more time in nature to reconnect with herself, noting, “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live” (67). Rather than turning to self-help books or religious ideologies, Dillard seeks nature, and her encounter with the weasel reminds her to live more instinctively. Where the weasel lives “in necessity,” human beings live “in choice,” and this can cause confusion and unhappiness.
Dillard suggests that her life has become overwhelmed with the things that are not essential, but rather optional, and which cause an unnecessary amount of worry and stress. Dillard fantasizes about latching onto the weasel and letting it take her down into its lair, where she could get out of her “ever-loving mind” and back to her “careless senses” (69), implying that her mind too often fixates on things that are unimportant. Reconnecting with her senses would allow Dillard to live a purer life—to focus on what truly matters and not be distracted by outside noise. These ideas carry traces of Romanticism, the privileging of nature as being pure and honest, contrasted to civilization, which is corrupt and deceitful. Trusting in nature and following her instincts, Dillard argues, would lead to a better, less confusing, more honest life—the kind of life the weasel lives.
Related Titles
By Annie Dillard
