Evan+On+Dillard

Dillard seems to be thinking through her encounter with this weasel, and the piece itself resembles the way actual human thoughts drift from something specific and small to something general and grand. That is, the essay coheres because it reflects her own experience and her own process of reflection. We encounter the weasel with Dillard, we think about the weasel and what, if anything, it "means", and then we witness her conclusion, or thesis, at the essay's end. To the reader, it might appear that the Dillard who is writing the beginning of the piece has not yet arrived at the conclusion of the Dillard at the end of the piece.

Of course, I think this is a conscious strategy or device on Dillard's part. Her use of language shifts, starting off vivid and clear -- we can see the lake, the weasel, and the confrontation between Dillard and the weasel very clearly. The language and style are plain and expressive. But she ends the piece in a kind of reverie, using sentences with many clauses, abstract language, and lofty rhetoric.

Her episodes start off very literally. For the first half of the piece, she simply narrates her encounter with the weasel, gives some background information about weasels, and asks some questions about what they think. Then, on page 68, she starts making meaning out of her encounter. "I would like to learn, or remember, how to live," and continues, "I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular. . . but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive." I'll admit, she started to lose me a little there. I thought she might be going down the road of searching of authenticity by becoming one with nature, something reminiscent of Thoreau that feels very New Age. But she takes this stance very seriously, and ends the piece with a poetic but very savage image of what it means to live a "pure" life. She's asking a very hard question, and I think she needs to drift into the land of abstraction and reverie in order to provide a good answer.

"The piece itself resembles...actual human thoughts"--I didn't think of this when I was reading, but I completely agree with you. Maybe that is why Dillard's entrance into the story feels so natural. After reading about the weasel that hung on to the eagle, I did start thinking about myself--as in, if I were that weasel, I would have let go the second the eagle left the ground. But my experience with it also reflects that not only do human thoughts tend to move from the specific to the grand, but I think there's a stop in between at the "self". Maybe human thoughts go from the specific to the self to the grand? (Or maybe mine do because I'm an only child. Haha)

I like your attention to language as well. She does start off very literal, both in what she describes and in the language she uses to describe it. It has a grounding effect on the reader. We can, as you say, picture what she is describing and understand it. She would have lost me if she started with her thesis--the abstract section on what it means to live purely, to devote yourself to one necessity and let it take you where it may. She puts it last because she uses the entire piece to prepare us for it. When she starts talking about these large issues of how we should live and what our purpose should be, I felt grounded by the metaphor of the weasel and the eagle. I pictured it vidily when she described it earlier as a literal occurance, and was then able to call up that image when asked to think about it abstractly at the end of the piece.