A Field of Silence

As a result of her sleepless nights, Annie Dillard is able to recognize an almost unrealistic detail of the farm she lives nearby. The vast fields that cover her surroundings are completely silent and motionless at the time of dawn. Formerly, this silence had been unknown to her since the Earth is on the move day by day. By being awake at such wee hours of the morning, she’s suddenly able to recognize that silence does exist. I could tell that the speaker was stunned by this discovery because she had to convince herself that “the silent fields were the real world” and not a dream.
Since everything around her lacked motion, Dillard felt conscious of herself. I compared this to the concept of holiness. In the first place, I believe the way the author describes the scenery is calm, serene and beautiful. Furthermore, the words she implements directly relate to Heaven; Dillard confirms that “the farm seemed eternal”. All these descriptions of the fields represent their purity, as if nothing else in the world could possibly compare. However, in all this greatness, Dillard feels uncomfortable in the midst of this. I believe she feels oppressed by all the sacredness around her, since she knows she personally can’t manage to compare to it. As she admits, she felt “self-conscious, and wishing to die”. The former statement verifies her fear of being inferior in contrast to all the superior beauty around her.
In the end, Dillard directly admits this concept of Heaven. She begins to think that the fields are roamed by “thousands of spirits”, “angels”. Therefore, these opinions she has about the farm confirm why she’d felt like an outsider earlier, because she couldn’t compare to these spirits of Heaven