Total Eclipse

The sand bucket and shovel are a recurring motif in the text. As Dillard processes the eclipse, she again refers to these tools after a college student’s assertion that the eclipse looked like a “Life Saver”: “The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives” (23). These tools—used literally by children to create sandcastles—thus figuratively represent the creativity and power of language and the ways humans strive to build meaning. Notably, Dillard suggests that people build meaning for one another: “What is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance” (20). As she considers the urgency of participating in life due to its fleeting nature, she refers to these tools again, this time in relation to a group of men in the hotel lobby who, she presumes, were not among those in the hills viewing the eclipse:

You might wake up dead in a small hotel […] watching TV while […] the moon passes over the sun and nothing changes and nothing is learned because you have lost your bucket and shovel and no longer care (26).