Blog assignment #2: Reading Description

Response to Annie Dillard's Total Eclipse (in the book Creating Nonfiction)

-"I lay in bed and looked at the painting on the hotel room wall. It was a print of a detailed and lifelike painting of a smiling clown's head, made out of vegetables. It was a painting of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget." pg. 284

-"Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it." pg. 286

-"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." pg. 288

I chose these quotes because they are very descriptive, the author uses alot of detail and shows, through her writing, how she was feeling or what she was feeling as the event was unfolding, which was her experiencing a total eclipse.
I chose the first quote because it was very interesting to me how she remembered a random painting from a hotel, but the words she uses makes you want to believe her. It kind of is like when you go somewhere for the first time and see something out of the ordinary, you are most likely going to remember it whether it was strange or not, in her case it was a painting of a clown made out of vegetables.
The next quote i chose (from page 286) was also interesting to me because the author used similes to get a better understanding of what she was trying to tell the reader. She was saying that a partial eclipse isnt the same as a total eclipse and there are differences like when you are in an airplane versus when you are falling out of one, it is a completely different experience and i just liked how she used that to tell the reader what she was experiencing.
The last quote i chose was very descriptive and i liked how the author made it so the reader could visualize those things happening and i just thought it was a very good piece of imagery.