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Holy the Firm

annie dillard

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"[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review. . . . The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. . . . Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear. . . . A rare and precious book." — Frederick Buechner,  New York Times Book Review From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a book about the grace, beauty, and terror of the natural world.  In the mid 1970s, Annie Dillard spent two years on an island in Puget Sound in a room with a solitary window, a cat, and a spider for company, asking herself questions about memory, time, sacrifice, reality, death, and God. Holy the Firm , the diary-like collection of her thoughts, feelings, and ruminations during this time, is a lyrical gift to any reader who have ever wondered how best to live with grace and wonder in the natural world.

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1977
Literary awards
washington state book award, 

This edition

Format
76 pages, Paperback
Published
December 30, 1998 by Harper Perennial
ISBN
9780060915438
ASIN
0060915439
Language
English

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About the author

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annie dillard

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
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Seky
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I read this much too fast and will read it again soon.

I feel like Dillard's work, and this book in particular, is to writing what impressionism is to painting. I don't always get it, but I love it. I wish I could write like her.

She lost me at points, but blew me away at others. Not a long enough book to get bogged down in either. Must be I am trying to sell my favorite authors tonight, but I feel like this one would be a decent taste of Dillard for those who can't quite get into her otherwise: short, enough rewarding images and accessible passages to make it worth it.

I love this, about 10 pages in, out of nowhere and it's own paragraph:
"Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language at the corner where eternity clips time."
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monocha_re
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Slow beginning, great ending. Great writing; you can see everything she writes about, very descriptive. The book starts out very nature oriented, ends with the same nature inspired narration, but adds her thoughts on spirituality much more vividly at the end.
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MrMeruem
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard certainly can not be accused for excess verbiage. Her little book, consisting of less than eighty pages, is a thoughtful and sometimes intense investigation into the soul. One can almost imagine her staring deeply at a flowing river or a particular kind of tree and genuinely seeing Divinity in and around it, authentically feeling it and being transportated to the nether reaches of the unexplained. Yet, it is a good place or moment where nothing can touch you or hurt you. It is the zone where you have that elongated, never ending epihany. However, in Holy the Firm, she has that exact moment or moments, citing a couple of specific occasions and or happenings: a moth engulfed in a candle flame, a child severely burned in an airplane mishap and lastly, a baptism on a chilly day on a beach. Her stabbing gaze and visual processing is an inherent endowment for us all but very seldom used, sad to say. Each example that she bethinks, on the surface, looks violent and harsh and horrible. But behind that mask of the unpleasant, there is profound cheer at the transformation of the perception, of soul development, and yes, of course, of the logical, humanistic and psychological plain of thought processing, filtering and transforming. The essay, in no uncertain terms, conveys a kind of WOW factor that says, I don't really know how this whole thing operates, but isn't it amazing nonetheless? The deity of God has to be here, right in front of our very eyes, every moment, every instance, every half second. Holiness is under a rock, in people, in nature, in moments (good and bad), one giant gelatinous glob with so many tags and definitions attached to it. But only the Holy makes it cohesive and function. This work is not so little in its implications and gratitude. There is a majesty here, an august celebration. And we're all in it together, a gem of a book!
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Thebelgianwaffle
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I am writing this review on my laptop so you know I have thoughts and it's about to get serious.
Firstly, I am so in love with the way Annie Dillard pieces words together. "The sky is gagging on trees." HUH?!! Never in a million years could I think of words to describe something like that but that's just such incredible imagery. That's not even close to the most beautiful passage I could use as an example.
Aside from her incredible talent for vivid imagery, Holy the Firm has, as my bio says, one of my favorite writing concepts: dying bugs! However, what stands out most about this book is (what I think Dillard is directing towards) its Proverbial wisdom. It starts slow and unrealized until you can't escape it anymore. She is constantly bringing up "wisdom" and "knowledge," which I believe is her way of offering an explanation for the passage, "Knowledge is the beginning of wisdom." For example, after she sees the moth in the bathroom, she then reflects on how she is able to tell that the bug corpse on her tile floor is a moth because she has seen a dead moth before. This leads her to a story of a moth landing in a fire, and its body stays burning, now working like one of the logs.
Knowledge leads you to wisdom, but knowledge is not inaccessible. Knowledge is not spending all of your money on an institution or person that will train you and give you the right book list to become the smartest, most well-read person alive who understands all the philosophical concepts. Knowledge is attending to the world God has placed you in so that it becomes familiar and recognizable to you. She has seen and reflected on the death of a moth and now recognizes this same creature again in another context. Because Dillard attends to the world and gains knowledge of it, she is able to find its wisdom: the girl who sings at the local church, the holiness of store-bought wine, that love itself is greater than knowledge. And that's where wisdom comes in. Recognizing the knowledge of those objects of creation only goes so far, you must then interact with them, love them, or, as the Seraphs, be on fire for them. And above all these objects you recognize the creator and ultimately love him most. Because you can also recognize HIS love for those creations.
Idk I just really loved this book and have many thoughts. Maybe none of this is accurate, but it's what I pulled from this amazing book and I think it's so cool that this little work of Dillard's does so much to my soul and mind. I need to go to Puget sound!!!!! I need to go to Washington!! I think it would help me better understand what it's like to see the substance "Holy the Firm."
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JoaoTanekosy7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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scared of how it made me feel full, angry, weighted and uneasy, & looked at, in 65 pages. “if gods are days, then gods are dead, and artists pyrotechnic fools”
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see_me_rollin
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Highly concentrated, complex music by Annie Dillard--sometimes I think I'm only getting the harmonies, and missing the themes. But such brilliant instrumental passages!
There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead--as if innocence had ever been--and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been.
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main_antagonist
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Not to be an oracle or anything but Annie Dillard is going to define my entire life.
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preston_namikaze
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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dillard is truly a master of prose. i wish i could find the words to do her writing justice. the way she describes nature, God, time, and life itself is so beautiful. she is at once irreverent and reverent, cynical and hopeful in a way that feels unmistakenly human. i'll definitely be reading more of her works soon!

some of my favorite lines from the book:

I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.
The actual percentage of land mass to sea in the Sound equals that of the rest of the planet: we have less time than we knew. Time is eternity’s pale interlinear, as the islands are the sea’s. We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild.
It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras. We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.
Seraphs love God; cherubs, who are second, possess perfect knowledge of him. So love is greater than knowledge; how could I have forgotten?
Who are we to demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?)
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