A Moment in the Darkness

I chose the chunk of the essay that described the eclipse. This part of the essay stood out to me because it is a very key moment. The essay's title is "Total Eclipse", so I figured that the description of the eclipse would be the most important part. My favorite part is when Annie Dillard compares the eclipse to a dragon. She says that even though the eclipse didn't actually look like a dragon, it seemed more mythical than anything she could imagine. This made the essay more unfamiliar and unusual to the reader. Annie also used descriptions like "lid of a pot" and "materialized out of thin air" which are two great ways to describe the eclipse. The purpose of this part is to again, give creative ways to describe the eclipse. The use of different colors and descriptive words help make the eclipse almost appear in your mind when reading. This part of the essay fits in nicely. She does a great job describing in my mind the most import part of the story. Without this description, the story would be bland and harder to understand.