Seeing by Annie Dillard

Summary Response
“Seeing” is the second chapter from Annie Dillard’s book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Dillard’s mission is to justify how people see and perceive the world. Throughout the chapter, Dillard tries to explain the affects of sight and how it is processed though lightness and darkness. By incorporating her natural surroundings, Dillard can easily portray the many affects of lightness and darkness by the use of vision. The author’s main purpose is to comprehend the meaning of sight in the life you are living in. Dillard suggests that our observations help us look deeper and look past anything insignificant in your life. In this chapter, she uses many examples of dark and light imagery. She speaks of the people who have been blind throughout their entire lives and now they are able to see again through the miracle of having a surgery. Dillard states how some of them do not like it and want to go back too seeing darkness again, but the others are amazed to the feeling of seeing a whole new world.
After reading the text, I began to visualize the images and scenery that was presented throughout the lines. I felt as though I was standing exactly where the author was and experiencing the sights in the text. The purpose of the text is clear. The author, Annie Dillard explicates the meaning of how individuals perceive life. She wrote this to explain the important things in life and with her use of imagery and clear examples; she presented the text in a wonderful way. Dark and light are two major differences, but we can’t have one without the other. If there were no darkness, then light wouldn’t seem such a cheery thing. And without light, the dark wouldn’t seem so frightening and scary. In my opinion Annie Dillard was able to display just how much the both mean to our society and us. Even though the book was written mostly about nature, all we have to do is read between the lines to see how closely it mimics human life. “’Still,’ wrote Van Gough in a letter, ‘a great deal of light falls on everything.’ If we are blinded by the darkness, we are also blinded by the light. When too much light falls on everything, special terror results.” Annie Dillard incorporates a quote by Van Gough that talks about the effects of light on blind people. The light can also blind people who have been able to see their entire life. One must remember that although having light in our lives is a wonderful thing, it can also hurt our eyes, and it can also cause images like shadows that can frighten us eventually. I would want to know what inspired the author to write this text, and what ideas she thinking about upon writing. If I were to rate this text I would present it with a ten because of its wonderful plot and presentation. Throughout each paragraph she managed to present her thoughts clear and focused with stories of her past.