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Into the Darkness [1]

Creative Nonfiction [2]
4.17.12

In her essay "Total Eclipse" from Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (Harper Collins, 1982), Annie Dillard recalls traveling to the top of a mountain to witness a total solar eclipse. The darkness she discovered as the sun disappeared, in a world suddenly without light, was incomprehensible and terrifying, but also illuminating. "What I saw," she writes, "what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world." Write about a time when you disappeared into darkness—whether by your own choosing or not—and emerged again into the light, with a new understanding.


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/into_the_darkness

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[1] https://www.pw.org/content/into_the_darkness [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/creativenonfiction