Penumbra

     My deadline was five PM. and I still had not taken the perfect picture. I spent my whole morning walking through the city snapping random pictures of the passerby's, looking down at my camera to view them, then deleting with anger and discontent. My anger only depend when I could here my fathers disapproving voice bellow through the wind low and husky " art is not a profession, you should take up politics or something worth doing." My parents never approved of my wanting to paint and be creative. From a very early age I remember when our family would ask me what I wanted to be my mother would answer for me "oh well darling, it obvious she will be a doctor what else would account for that horrid penmanship" Little did she know my handwriting was bad because of the hours I spent holding tight to a pencil as I attempted to recreate the corner of my room on a sheet of paper. I drew pictures all day, some realistic and others more fantastical. When my mother found them she depreciated my work as "a nice little hobby." I never blamed them for their lifelessness, father's father was a physician and his father was a lawyer and as for mother, she comes from a long line of women married to wealthy men.

    I decided to talk a  walk through a park near my school. The walkway started just on the outside of a car intersection and gradually became more and more rural. Walking into the park was like walking through the closet doors to Narnia. I fell into a different world just by walking fifteen feet into a park. The trees swung low and wilt and sad, they looked how the world felt cold and wet and limp. The greens of the trees swallowed up most of the grey sky that begin to darken with rain clouds. As I walked down the man made walkway my shoes clicked clacked against the pavement in harmony with the flutter of leaves against the wind and birds orchestrating the entire symphony. I pulled out my camera to catch a picture of two birds wading in a shallow puddle. I knelt down on one knee into the pavement, aimed my cannon at the two House Sparrows splashing in the pool of water and in a burst of bright yellowy orange the birds flew away and I captured them all at the same time. I stood up and looked to review my photo and to my disappointment the birds had began to fly away way before I snapped my picture. I deleted the photo put my camera back into the case and continued on with my walk.
     It was 3pm and I had 2 hours to digitally capture a piece of time that only I would be able to see first hand. My problem is that my best is never really good enough, even if I was able to imprison the 5am sunrise across the Sahara Desert within my camera there would still be something I could have done better. This inside voice sets me back everytime but this time around it might cost me my grade.
I was extremely confused, this entire fortress of solitude, the massive chocolate barks of the trees in correspondence with the forrest green tree tops, the somber air that the dark clouds produced, the angle at which the pavement dipped steeply down from where I stood and rose back up even higher about a quarter mile down, how could I have not produced the perfect still photo.
    I was approaching the end of the park limp and slow with disappointment. It was about 4pm now and the clouds had began to break and the sun assumed its position at the highest point in the sky. I stood on the outside of the park which let me out on the same side that I came in. I looked out onto the water that park overlooked and I opened my camera to look through some old photos to choose which one I would present instead. While turning my camera on I almost lost grip of it, and in a desperate attempt to prevent my device from plummeting to the ground I snatch it by the neck carrier and juggle it until it rested back in my hands. Once the equipment was back in my hands I was holding it a little tighter than necessary for fear it would fall again, while doing this I accidentally pressed the shutter button and took a picture. I stood there analyzing the photo, it was love at first sight. It was so simple yet it satisfied the objective. A photo of something that can only be seen from my perspective. There I realized that the one things that would work best for this assignment was following me around the entire day. My shadow.

     

     

     Annie Dillard uses many literary techniques in order to describe the entire environment of where she is during the eclipse. She uses a lot of comparisons and juxtapositions in an attempt to show us what she is experiencing herself. For example when Dillard writes " It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day, It looked as though we had all crawled out of spaceships and were preparing to assault the valley below. It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, stelae in a ring." Here Dillard compare the simple act of standing on the hills to watch an eclipse to things you would see out of a science fiction movie. This line is important because it is dark and eerie.

     You can tell by how Annie Dillard is writing that this experience is new and different to her and that there is a slight apprehension toward the idea of being there. This is also seen in the line where       Dillard writes " There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world's dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet's crust, while the earth rolled down". In this line Dillard describes the settings as drained of life and energy. Only moments before the eclipse she is weary about being there to watch it happen.

     Dillard sets up a whole ambiance in which the reader feels as strange and uncomfortable as she feels. This works well for what she is writing about because not many people have witnessed an eclipse first hand therefore not many will know what to be expecting when reading about one. Annie Dillard does a great job in creating an experience, this is also shown in the line "I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. the grasses were wrong, they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographers platinum print." These lines paint an image. In the moment after the sun is engulfed in darkness the world does not go black, but instead goes silver and platinum. She goes on to talk about how the sky was a dark blue and her hand were also silver. The way she writes in these lines remind me of the twilight zone and give a new vibe to the idea of what an eclipse is. She paints a different picture than most would and I enjoy reading this essay.
    Anne Dillard is a picasso of  creative nonfiction in this essay. From the beginning of the story she illustrates her surroundings from the hotel and the painting of the clown on the wall to the people standing on the hill waiting for the eclipse up until the actual eclipse.