أحب الكتب التي تصنف في "امتداح العزلة"، العزلة التي تجعل المرء يرى كثيرًا من الأمور العادية رؤية مختلفة، يغدو متبصرًا، ويمتلك القدرة على النفاذ إلى دقائق الكون والذات.
تأملات فريدة بترجمة فريدة..

This is heady, abstract, concrete, brilliant, and beautiful. At times I feel the essayist has meandered away from her readers, but I am happy trying to follow.

Reading Annie Dillard is like mowing the tall grass: make a pass at a sentence, back up, make another pass, repeat as necessary. Here, Dillard is perhaps at her most mystic, her most metaphorical. She's wrestling with holiness and spirit in the wake of dumb tragedy (in this case, the severe burning of a child in a plane wreck) and doing so--as her bent--with an unforgiving rigor.

To Dillard, the sentence is the primary source of meaning in the world, and she works hers over until they are all pebbled. These observations took place over three days; the revision took 14 months. The result is a tome that will either frustrate or fascinate, a contraption that fits together elegantly but draws at every pivot one's eye toward its maker, who is staring fiercely back at you.

So how much do you like Dillard? This wee tome might just be your measuring stick. If you love this (or can even tolerate her fierce gaze long enough to glean what this text has to offer--which is considerable), then Dillard is likely your bag. If you cannot...well then the rest had best be skipped.

Me, I'm reading on, but I might carry a blade. Even on the page, Dillard will cut you.

This is a glorious non-fiction book. Dillard takes the quotidian and turns it into poetry. Her description of fealty is a sublime mix of joy and terror. Her descriptions are so lovely the reader often forgets she is writing about pain, or agony, or death. This book is not religious but is overflowing with faith. Do yourself a favor and check it out!

Unusually contemplative, mystical piece of work about pain and solitude, and it's funny too.

too poetic for me. also, why do Christians seem to want to anthropomorphize nature all the time? Isn't it good enough without having to talk about it being "a little man"? ugh

This is one of the top five books that have shaped my life. The person who gave it to me told me to read it twice. That was amazing advice. The first read was beautiful. It was obviously packed with symbolism I wasn't quite apprehending and it was jammed to the gills with gorgeous florid language and vibrant imagery. (Oh, and by 'jammed to the gills' I mean that by the time you are a few pages in you can not help but see how she has already begun to knit words together so that everything references at least one other thing in the book as well, if not three other things. Water, land, time, eternity, salt, wax, trees, and fire burning with or without light.) all of this rich interconnection of ideas is not just for poetic fun, it tears away shrubs that hide the hardest questions of human suffering, beautifully.

As I was saying, In the first reading I thought it was pretty, a brightly colored creature. Then the second reading stung me like brightly colored creatures are prone to do.

To avoid spoilers, I will just say that after the second read I closed the book to discover I had been crying and my heart, racing. I sat it down to find I was already praying a prayer I couldn't seem to quit: that I would become part of God's answer to the suffering in this world.

To say the book has changed me is....adorable. When I opened the book the first time I was a depressed graduate student, when I set it down the second time, I was a nun with her face on fire.

Now I read it once a year.

Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard is a reflection in three parts, written on a Puget Sound island in a room with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." Dillard’s language is poetic and violent and asking—a raw study in the spiritual, surrounded by the tragic and the peaceful found within the natural world. Dillard’s honesty sinks into "the hard things-- rock mountain and salt sea," and still searches to see the beauty on the other side.

Some days the veil really does feel so thin, and you can watch the sky click into place. Or feel the flame of existence burning, consuming your wick. Questions and maybe answers about the benevolence of God, the universe, the crude gods of the day, and of the root of our reality. This was a sensitive exploration and articulation of the questions we have but are not always able to pose in words.

Read this on a gulf island ferry / in a cabin on St Mary Lake on Salt Spring island, one of the islands Dillard sketches on the horizon from her home - “a new island, a new wrinkle, the deepening of wonder, behind the blue translucence the sailor said is Salt Spring Island.”

I still love this book as much as I did first time around. Beautifully written with much to ponder! Best nature spiritual book ever!

i've read this book every year for the past 3 years, and while i still love it, it's begun to fall apart for me. still figuring out why.

"وأنا كنت أقرأ، وأغلي الماء، وأجدّد الشموع، وأعاود القراءة".