Merry Wanderer of the Night + TIME

Awesome Essays: A Field of Silence

My hope is that I'll be able to be so passionate and intense about A Field of Silence by Annie Dillard that you will all go out and find a copy of it in some book (probably Teaching a Stone to Talk) and read it immediately. Unfortunately when I am super excited about a book or an essay I become a blubbering idiot. But let's give it a go. The essay is about fields and farms and spirits. Dillard once lived on a farm with another couple, "an ordinary farm, a calf-raising, haymaking farm, and very beautiful." She spends a few pages talking about what she loved about the farm, the clutter of it, the loneliness of it. She gets the description exactly right when she calls it "self-conscious." Then she says something that made me squeal like a pig I was so thrilled to read this section of this essay.

"My impression now of those fields is of thousands of spirits--spirits trapped, perhaps, by my refusal to call them more fully, or by paralysis of my own spirit at that time--thousands of spirits, angels in fact, almost discernible to the eye, and whirling. If pressed I would say they were three or four feet from the ground. Only their motion was clear (clockwise, if you insist); that, and their beauty unspeakable.
There are angels in those fields, and, I presume, in all fields, and everywhere else. I would go to the lions for this conviction, to witness this fact. What all this means about perception, or language, or angels, or my own sanity, I have no idea."

I really can't explain why I loved this section so much. I think it perfectly encompasses the mystery of fields and the feelings I had about them as a child. I really liked Annie Dillard before, but now I love her. I love her. She goes from describing the loneliness of fields and the country to understanding how she is surrounded by tradition, by those who lived there before her. By the farmers who farmed and died and left their fields. It's just so completely beautiful.

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Awesome Essays: A Field of Silence + TIME