Holy the Firm

Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm is a uniquely pleasant and simultaneously jarring read. The language and imagery pays a graceful homage to earth—nature—and life, while stringing along with it a loose narrative of thought that braves questions and ideas too large for promise of a single answer.


Favorite passage:
Part 3, Holy the Firm

“I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone? Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds. The air is buoyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses. The earth stuck through it is noisome, lighted, and salt. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? ‘Whom shall I send,' heard the first Isaiah, ‘and who will go for us?' And poor Isaiah, who happened to be standing there-and there was no one else— burst out, ‘Here am I; send me.'”

I could not get into this book though I did slog through the end. I may have not been in the place to read this book when I read it. Will try again soon.

‘We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.'

One can count on Annie Dillard for Spiritual/metaphysical recalibration and a heavy dose of stepping back and seeing reality for what it is, or isn't—'reality checks' abound in her work.

‘How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
What can any artist set on fire but his world?'

This was my second reading of this petite poetic novella. I am positive I'll be reading it again someday.

My father once made a gift of this book to me, and I still remember being transformed by the beauty of it.

I lost the original copy he gave me, but I was able to replace it today.

Last week I re-read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It fits in with a recent inclination to read personal accounts by gifted observers of the natural world. Writing by Thoreau, Annie Dillard, John McPhee (Encounters With the Archdruid is a wonderful book) has gotten me through another lonely winter.

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