Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

In Chapter 1, Dillard describes a strange painting on the wall in her hotel room, “the sort of which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget” (1). The painting of a clown, its features formed by a variety of produce—cabbage, carrots, string beans, parsley, chili peppers—lingers with Dillard long after she leaves the hotel. Though she goes on to have a profound experience viewing the total eclipse, the moment is almost overshadowed by the strangeness of this painting. Dillard writes: 

Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go. Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember—but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel (1).

Though the painting plays a small role in the essay, Dillard includes this moment as a reference to the strangeness of memory. The mind often creates strange associations between events of importance and sometimes mundane, sometimes bizarre people, places, or things connected to them.