The best book I've read by a contemporary writer. It's something akin to a creative nonfiction, sort-of treatise on spirituality, moreover on Christ.

As a fan of Annie Dillard, this is the one I read and immediatley felt terrible, sick (even) afterwards, knowing I'd never find anything else as sublime and startlingly beautiful as this.

It's a short work but dense. Every time I read it, I get more out of it. So, I guess that's my consolation; I can read it again and again and get more and more.

kind of trippy, like she (Dillard) was on drugs but my professor is adamant that she wasn't.

Video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNIfza...

WOW. I read this while staying on Galiano Island and looking west, through arbutus and fir, out at Gulf Islands in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, probably less than 20 miles from the view Dillard was looking at when she wrote it. This is truly art - theology, philosophy, nature writing, spirituality, biography, all rolled into one poetic-prose package. How the prose can be so sparse and evocative at the same time seems (to me) like serious magic. I feel different putting this book down than I did when I first picked it up. I feel changed, like my eyes see in different shades, or like there is a new nerve connecting my head and heart, or else that I've become more aware of it.

A deceptively slim meditation on time, suffering, gods, and the mystery-laden Puget Sound. I'd love to read it with a discussion group or a philosopher friend. "There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were."

Some reviewers praise it for sounding like poetry, but I criticize it for that. No one wants to get tricked into reading poetry.

I’m a big fan of any book that makes references to Julian of Norwich

I think Holy the Firm is one of the hardest reads I’ve done for a long time. It wasn’t enjoyable-but the insights were often joyful; it wasn’t technically complex writing - but the ways ideas of landscape and beauty and the Divine fold in on themselves are astonishing. If the first essay, which sets the tone, is shocking (beautiful and engaged but somehow dispassionate as Dillard watches a moth burn in a candle flame), the second draws the reader more deeply into the mysteries she Is exploring. True to her style, there are passages where Augustine meets Wordsworth: “The god of today is a child... He thrives in a cup of wind, landlocked and thrashing.” In the second part we meet the subject of her meditation on human suffering, Julie Norwich, and Dillard’s despairing theodicy: “God despises everything, apparently... a brute and a traitor.”
It is in the final, eponymous essay that all this comes together. It would truly be a spoiler - odd to think of essays needing this decision- to say how the author resolves (or doesn’t resolve) her lines of argument, but the opening of essay three is both an indication of her faith and an exhibition of her writing power: “I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation’s dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs." Simply awe inspiring.

I think the thing I love the most about Annie Dillard is how she’s going to weave together real life events with nature with ponderings and thoughts of God. There is no separation. This is life all-living, to be open to the Spirit to give you a word while you watch a moth burn, while you wrestle with the hard, as you buy a bottle of wine. To walk within the veil while our time here slips by...

This was a small book, but an impactful treasure. Annie is head and heart with an artist’s touch.

I do not say this lightly, but Annie Dillard is one of the most important voices of our lifetime. She is a national treasure.

Dillard does her thing here, and does it well--she makes observations of the natural world and the events around her and draws from them questions and curiosities, suggestions and substance. The book has something of a slow building quality to it as Dillard circles ever closer to that primary event which spawns her most significant thoughts on suffering, time, and God--a tragic burning accident involving a little girl. That such calamities strike drives us to question, to seek understanding. And while Dillard is as in tune with the world around her as ever, she struggles to identify meaning in this evil accident. However, Dillard still responds to it. She questions. She surmises. She wonders. And then she drives toward her conclusion, where she offers the only response an outsider can offer: she sacrifices. She offers to devote her own life to the transcendent on behalf of this little girl. In the face of unimaginable evil, Dillard gives the only thing she has to give--herself.

This slim volume electrified and astounded me with its depth and poetry. Dillard writes of her time spent in a one-room shack on an island in Puget Sound in northeast Washington with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person". With marvelous metaphors and surprising turns of phrase, this prose poem explores the eternal in the particular and vice versa, reaching for a solution for the paradoxes evident in the most common perspectives of our place in the universe. The view of God acting only occasionally in our world begs the question of the emptiness of the rest, while the pantheistic view of immanence throughout undercuts reality in a different way. A tragedy that befalls a young girl in the community (terrible facial burning in an airplane accident), as well as more mundane intimations of mortality from moths in candle flames and predations of spiders and cats, provide the stimulus for pondering the fragile aspect of existence. She strives well to portray a vision of the world creating itself and reaches toward a conception of the "Absolute" as something present at the most fundamental levels of matter, time, and space, which she calls "Holy the Firm". But "These are only ideas, by the single handful" and "What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the alter but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are?" This book will linger in my mind for a long time. Powerful and spiritually enlightening, even for an atheist such as me.