Dillard -Page six left hand column bottom paragraph, (counting the first page)

While reading Dillard, a sense of pain and emptiness can come over oneself. Two metaphors can be looked at, "I lacked fuel for liftoff" and "empty kettle on a hot burner". These quotes come off very empty sounding. "I lacked fuel for liftoff" can be taken as an empty context because of the word "lacked" which means, it had none in the tank. The other quote explicitly says "empty". Two other quotes that can be looked at are, "My stomach felt bruised or burned" and "Needle in a doctor's hand" comes off as a passage of pain. The words "bruised" and "burned" are hard sounding words, and paint a picture of pain being inflected onto oneself. "Needle in a doctor's hand" can depict pain just by the word "needle".
Whether it be her writing or her life, she gambles it all. "Smoked more to stimulate the brain or stop the heart, whichever came first." Here, she talks about her own personal health. Smoking is harmful to the body, and when one smokes, they gamble their chance to live a healthier longer life. "I wrote four or five sentences on a gamble", this quote directly says "gamble" which to the reader, may seem that Dillard was just writing without thinking and putting down what sounded right at the time, and potentially destroying the point of direction for her book. Also, with these quotes comes parallelism. The parallelism can be seen with the gambling. It can be sensed that Dillard tends to put her life into her writing, and by gambling both her life and her books.
Dillard looks for inspiration multiple times by using the words, "stimulate again", "refuel", and "refined". The subword 're' means to do again, which goes back to the point of looking for inspiration multiple times.
Lastly the quote, "A new section must be begun in the book, and a place found to put it in." Two perspectives can be taken on this. One, is towards Dillard's life personally. The book can be things that are going on in her life and she needs a way to sort them out and put them away. The other perspective that can be seen is taken literally. The book needs a genre to be put in, but so far, Dillard does not know what she wants to write towards.