Ehrlich and Dillard: Nature, Solitude, and Awakening

Introduction: Personal Connections to Nature

In Gretel Ehrlich's "The Solace of Open Spaces" and Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse," we encounter two writers who share a deeply personal — perhaps even psychological — connection to the nature that surrounds them. Ehrlich discusses her beloved Wyoming and has given her essay an apt title, describing the experience of driving for miles without seeing another person. She writes: "The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet" (Ehrlich 6). This observation seems natural when one considers that in a place like Wyoming, a person will encounter far more animals than people. Gretel Ehrlich grounds her writing in the rhythms and textures of daily life in that landscape.

Dillard begins her essay by describing the five-hour drive with her husband Gary through snowy mountains that gradually melt into green valleys to watch a total eclipse. She writes, "I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out" (Dillard 3) — a sentence that evokes both solitude and silence. In these two opening passages, the reader feels the power of the places each author witnesses, and how each allows nature to wash over her. Both Ehrlich and Dillard sit and bear witness to the space around them — mesmerized and awestruck — neither fighting what they see nor resisting how they feel.

Solitude and the Vastness of Natural Spaces

Ehrlich describes the open spaces of Wyoming as beautiful, though the landscape can also be harsh, particularly during bitterly cold winters. She writes: "The landscape hardens into a dungeon of space. During the winter, while I was riding to find a new calf, my jeans froze to the saddle, and in the silence that such cold creates I felt like the first person on earth, or the last" (Ehrlich 2). While "a dungeon of space" might evoke terror when taken out of context, within Ehrlich's description it produces a sense of peace.

The reader similarly senses that Annie Dillard is keenly aware of the scale and grandeur of the world as she stands looking upon the Yakima valley, regarding it as though it were some kind of dream or a Shangri-La (Dillard 6). She notes the sky that seems to stretch without end. As Dillard takes in the world around her, the reader feels that she, too, might be the first or last person on earth. Her husband Gary disappears from those paragraphs entirely; it is only Dillard and nature. Both writers, then, arrive at a similar experience of radical solitude even when they reach it by different routes.

Awe, Wonder, and the Experience of Eclipse

Dillard's awareness of the total eclipse as a phenomenon is vivid and direct. She writes:

"What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know. It is especially different for those of us whose grasp of astronomy is so frail that, given a flashlight, a grapefruit, two oranges, and fifteen years, we still could not figure out which way to set the clocks for daylight savings time. Usually it is a bit of a trick to keep your knowledge from blinding you. But during an eclipse it is easy. What you see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know" (Dillard 7).

Just as Dillard marveled at the total eclipse, Ehrlich found equally awe-inspiring things in Wyoming. She states that when she first decided to go to Wyoming it was to "lose myself" (Ehrlich 3) — something Dillard does as well while watching the eclipse — but Ehrlich was never able to return to California because she was so steadied by Wyoming's "absolute indifference" (Ehrlich 4). She had expected to be numbed by Wyoming, but instead found herself more awake than before. Total solar eclipses carry a similar power in Dillard's account: they strip away accumulated knowledge and force a direct encounter with the world as it is.

Dillard also speaks explicitly about the act of waking up. She writes, "We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up" (Dillard 13). This is — perhaps — what philosophers might call the noumenon, or the thing-in-itself: an encounter with reality unmediated by habit or assumption. Waking up can be unexpected, as it was for Ehrlich, but it can also be something we must consciously cultivate. As Dillard observes, "We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall" (Dillard 13).

Works Cited

Dillard, Annie. The Annie Dillard Reader. Harper Perennial, 1995. Print.

Ehrlich, Gretel. The Solace of Open Spaces. Penguin (Non-Classics), 1986. Print.