What Summer Conceals, Winter Reveals

Dillard uses many literary elements in her writing, most notably alliteration, personification, metaphor, repetition, anecdotes, and simile. She uses these oftentimes to make nature seem mystical and worth looking into. She’s very much about exploring: exploring the area, exploring space, exploring new ideas and thoughts, and exploring the whole natural world down to tiny organisms in the creek. In the first half of the book there is a lot of focus on insects and the effect they have on her and in the world. “Insects, it seems, have to do one horrible thing after another.” (Dillard 64) She talks about how they are horrifying yet fascinating. A lot of her anecdotes have to do with insects, like when she was a child and her teacher kept a moth in a jar until its wings had solidified to its back, practically ending its life. She says she wants to notice the “lesser cataclysms” of life, and that she must give words to what she is seeing in order to make it real. She speaks of how insects hibernate (or die off), how they mate (and eat their mates), and so on. She also has a fascination with sight. She states “I’ve been thinking of seeing” and goes into detail about a study done where blind people become sighted and how they vision the world. She decides that she, too, would like to view the world in a new light. I think that is part of the reason why she’s so fascinated by insects and the smaller organisms, because they are such a huge part of our world but so often unnoticed or misunderstood. Another one of her anecdotes is about how her teacher kept hatched praying mantises in a jar and they all ate each other. She felt as though she should swallow the corpses left over in order to make their lives mean something. I think her writing this book is, in a way, swallowing the corpses. She’s bringing to light all these organisms and their mysterious ways of life. She makes them mystical and magical and fascinating for people who would otherwise just kill a bug as opposed to studying it. She also mimics Nature in that she exclaims that Nature is extravagant and she writes in a way that makes even mundane things seem extravagant.