This little book ranks as probably the best I’ve ever read. In any case, it’s a close tie with Buechner’s Godric. Annie Dillard is a mystic who earnestly searches for answers and gets a mystery instead.

In the first chapter of the book, Newborn and Salted, she establishes critical concepts of gods of days, salt and fire. The gods of days not only represent nature, but also randomness in the world – a randomness that ranges from the whimsical (a god dragged in by the cat) to blind destruction (a punk with a match in a barn). These gods will later be overshadowed by thoughts about the true God when the discourse turns to questions of immanence/emanence, theodicy and finally mystery.

Salt will turn out to be connected to Holy the Firm, and also represent the way in which “we” – especially artists and particularly the author – dissolve ourselves into this world to connect to the Absolute.

And fire – ah, that cruel and unforgettable description of the burning of the moth. The fire theme is strong: some of the gods play with matches, Rimbaud burned his brain out in his poems, the winged godlet’s hair was on fire, even the cat’s tail had to be put out. And later, of course, Julie Norwich gets burned in a plane crash, and will have to spend the rest of her life disfigured. The fate of this little girl, and the mystical union between the author, God and Julie, are main themes in the book.

Altogether, as I have indicated, the five stars in the standard rating system are insufficient for this book. As the cliché goes: You have to read it.

Abeit above my radar, i know this is very very good, just not my cup of tea.

seen strictly for quality, it's absolutely gorgeous. the imagery is vivid and so lush, i'm salivating 2/3 of the time until dillard gets overly indulgent & makes me want to scream at her to get on with it. her motifs & themes aren't the subtlest, but their usage is coherent & incredibly relevant although i don't agree with a lot of what she says most of the times.

tbh the second section, god's tooth, is when dillard rises. when she shit-talks god, she critiques them brutally. however, her resolution to reconcile her faith with her hatred was extremely disjointed and the handling of it was highly insensitive.

I love this bit: “There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.” Otherwise I’m not really sure I got it.

When I first read this book my heart had been deeply stirred by a compelling desire to experience God in his wild, untamed attributes, knowing that the experience would be terrifying and purifying. It was then that my deep desire was birthed to spend at least one year in the Pacific Northwest where I would experience the gray, windy, blustery, wet winter that only the Pacific Northwest knows. I knew it would be at once terrible and transformationally beautiful. Well, I got my wish when I moved up to Seattle to attend grad school. I have experienced the wild fury of God in ways that make me tremble and make me wish for a tamer God. Yet somehow I know deep inside that a tamer God than our Lord Christ would not be powerful enough for me. I have been buffetted by the blustery, cold winter winds of hardship and suffering. I have reached the end of my rope many times, but as I look back to the beginning days of my desire, I realize my prayers were answered. Why is it that I want to know Christ in this way? I can only say that a desire that is not of me has been planted in me, and it is a desire that can be satisfied in no other way than through the winds of adversity. You can see that this book has had a profound mystical affect on me--an affect that goes far deeper than the words could convey.

Inspired reading for my upcoming trip to the Oregon coast. Written during Dillard's stay on an island in Puget Sound, this short collection covers familiar territory: faith, nature, mystery. But also anger, injustice, and our collective obsession with The West.

"When I first came here I faced east and watched the mountains...since they are, incredibly, east, I must be no place at all. But the sun rose over the snowfields and woke me where I lay, and I rose and cast a shadow over someplace, and thought, There is, God help us, more...and turning my head, as it were, I moved to face west, relinquishing all hope of sanity, for what is more. And what is more is islands: sea, and unimaginably solid islands, and sea, and a hundred rolling skies. You spill your breath."

For the month before I turned 50, I chose a handful of books - for reflection, for enrichment, for inspiration. I didn't quite get what I bargained for with "Holy the Firm." Written during the 1970s, that era of me-me-me, sappy Coke ads and "Be Here Now," this small but fierce book feels out of place, steeped in the Old Testament. It consists of 3 succinct and tersely poetic essays written while Dillard was living alone in a fire watch cabin in the woods on Puget Sound. In this place, nature is cruel, God is cruel, and yet somehow - somehow! - this book offers a kind of comfort. Dillard does something that is rare anymore. She spends hours/days/weeks contemplating a single idea or a moth burning in a candle's flame. She ruminates in a way that a life filled with Facebook and Instagram and texting simply doesn't allow. Think about it. When was the last time you ruminated? It's a lost art. And art is at the core of Dillard's writing. What it means to be an artist in this world over which we have no control. The entire book is worth reading over and over, but the most compelling section is about a young girl whose face is disfigured in a small-plane crash. Dillard sees herself in this girl, and through her she also explores the problem, not with God, but with the way God is believed in. In this book, she looks at what God cannot do, rather than what He can, and with this she makes peace with the ruthlessness of the world.

12. Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
published: 1977
format: 72 page hardcover, large print edition
acquired: inherited from my neighbor upon his move
read: Feb 26
rating: 4

Read this in a sitting. It's an experience, but one I find very difficult to explain without showing by quoting a lot.

The first part is a self-absorbed praise of every tiny detail of life. She opens "Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time." She goes through an intense bending of language and reality, an almost surreal and poisoned optimism.

n  "The God of today is rampant and drenched. His arms spread, bearing moist pastures; his fingers spread, fingering the shore. He is time’s live skin; he burgeons up from day like an tree. His legs spread crossing the heavens, flicking hugely, and flashing and arcing around the earth toward night."n

Then in part two there is a plane crash, a small plane with a father and 7-yr-old daughter. Both survive, but the girls face is burned off. A sobering clash with the opening. Having contradicted her optimism, she looks, in the third and final part, for a way forward and looks to god and holiness in various concepts, touching heavily on Catholicism and some of its more obscure philosophies. She is, I imagined, looking to find something to hold all this together.

Thought provoking and exhausting, a poem in prose, magical and also not. I think this is one that could be read over and over, as one might a poem, perhaps with some reverence.

Some more quotes:

On bringing communion wine:

n  Here is a bottle of wine with a label, Christ with a cork. I bear holiness splintered into a vessel, very God of very God, the sempiternal science personal and brooding, bright on the back of my ribs. n

And, just because I love this line:

The hedgerows ... leafless stems are starting to live visibly deep in their centers, as hidden as banked fires live, and as clearly as recognition, mute, shines forth from eyes.

I am not religious, but I think people who are must find a great deal of comfort in this book. Dillard rages and then raves about god - his beauty and creations, his pain and his suffering - and most of all, asks why. I can only imagine that the religious, experiencing a loss, would find peace in the many feelings one has about religion and faith during pain and misery.

I already know the world is a fucked-up place with no good reasons to answer the why.

That said, and ignoring my slight confusion on the recommendation of this book to me, I did find Day 1 to be the most enjoyable. I like to find beauty in ordinary moments, and Dillard is a master at appreciating a day and the (extra)ordinary moments it can bring.

Annie Dillard is a poet and, as such, every sentence, paragraph, and movement in this slim prose poem contains multitudes. In the opening sentence, Dillard gives us a taste of the metaphysical exercise we're about to embark on: "every day is a god." Everything — each person, animal, plant, experience — is holy. The title itself which, as Dillard informs us later in the book, comes from Esoteric Christianity and refers to a special spiritual substance that exists "beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets," (p 72) also represents Dillard's own relationship with time. Time is all we can hold onto, according to Dillard. "Time is enough, more than enough, and matter multiple and given," (p 26). The firmness of time is holy. Holy the firm.

Dillard's famous moth essay (Google "Annie Dillard moth") comes at the beginning of Holy the Firm and serves as a frame for the violence and beauty to come. On a solo camping trip in the mountains, she watches with wonder as a moth gets burned alive by her candle and then becomes a wick, burning for hours, "like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God," (p 11). We go on through the work to experience through Dillard's eyes the trauma of a plane crash in her community and the single injury that was sustained: severe burns on the face of a little girl.

This leads Dillard to have a lot of doubt, questioning her relationship to a higher power. "If days are gods, then gods are dead, and artists pyrotechnic fools," (p 49). In the end, though, we have no choice but to throw up our hands and embrace the violence and beauty of life because, "the universe is real and not a dream," (p 75).

Despite a strong foundation in spirituality and, arguably, Christianity, Dillard seems to conclude that we can shirk god: "People are reasoned, while God is mad. They love only beauty, who knows what God loves?" (p 79). In three simple words, Dillard closes the book and sums up what is means to be present and embrace our fickle existence: "I am now."

I love Annie Dillard's writing but this one was odd. She is living alone near Puget Sound in a rustic cabin where she is close to nature. Her observations are acute and often beautifully written. In a journal format Dillard examines religion and appears to equate god with nature. She asks the big questions.... Why does god allow evil? Why is there so much suffering? She examines (in graphic detail) a moth consumed by the flame of a candle and later a child who is badly burned in a plane crash. The problem is that Dillard sounds as if she's on drugs. This rambles and gets oddly poetic. In the end she seems to decide that god, like nature, is beautiful and strong but violent and unpredictable.

"I live on northern Puget Sound, in Washington State, alone. I have a gold cat, who sleeps on my legs, named Small. In the morning, I joke to her blank face, Do you remember last night? Do you remember? I throw her out before breakfast, so I can eat."