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Grunden den heliga
I mitten av 1970-talet slår sig författaren Annie Dillard ned i ett hus vid Stillahavskusten, ensam med en katt, en spindel och ett stort fönster med utsikt mot havet. Under sina två år vid Pugetsundet ställer hon sig frågor om tid, verklighet, offerdöd och Guds vilja.
I Grunden den heliga skriver hon om en mal som förtärs av en ljuslåga, en sjuårig flicka som brännskadas i en flygolycka, ett dop på en strand, klippiga berg och salta hav. Resultatet är en lysande essä om livets skönhet och grymhet.
I Grunden den heliga skriver hon om en mal som förtärs av en ljuslåga, en sjuårig flicka som brännskadas i en flygolycka, ett dop på en strand, klippiga berg och salta hav. Resultatet är en lysande essä om livets skönhet och grymhet.
76 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
214 people are currently reading
6191 people want to read
About the author
Annie Dillard
62 books2,929 followersAnnie Dillard is an American author celebrated for her distinctive narrative voice in both fiction and nonfiction, as well as for her work in poetry, essays, literary criticism, novels, and memoir. She gained wide recognition with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a meditative exploration of nature and perception that received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and established her as a major literary figure. Raised in Pittsburgh, her formative years were marked by wide reading, close observation of the natural world, and a family environment that encouraged curiosity and wit, experiences later reflected in her memoir An American Childhood. She studied English, theology, and creative writing at Hollins College, where her academic engagement with writers such as Henry David Thoreau shaped her intellectual direction. Dillard’s work often blends spiritual inquiry, philosophy, and close attention to the physical world, drawing comparisons to writers such as Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. Her books include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Writing Life, For the Time Being, and the novels The Living and The Maytrees, the latter a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award. Alongside her writing career, she taught for more than two decades in the English department at Wesleyan University, influencing generations of students before retiring as Professor Emerita. Her work has been translated widely, adapted into other art forms, and honored with numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, affirming her lasting impact on American letters.
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September 24, 2020
Nature Worship
Holy the Firm is a metaphysical prose poem that doesn’t do what metaphysical poetry is usually meant to do, namely to suggest that which is beyond language. Religion is metaphysics ‘with intent.’ And Dillard certainly has intent. She wants us to be aware of her religion, which is neatly contained in her language.
Dillard’s book, like much of her other writing, is religious but with a difference. Religious poetry typically goes further than a statement of an abstract ‘beyondness’ by providing proper names, identities, like God, or Allah, or Jesus, or Vishnu or Zeus. All descriptions of such properly named entities are figurative, and, by definition, wrong because incomplete or misleading. Dillard’s poem does not do this. She doesn’t point elsewhere, beyond language; she points to the generic vocabulary which is within language already, things as they are experienced. This is a special kind of metaphysical poetry, and justifiably, I think, considered also as prose; and it says everything it needs to say. It points to Nature but only a collection of material beings, inanimate as well as living.
The use of proper names to ‘objectify’ the divine is what religious language, polytheistic as well as monotheistic, is traditionally about. Such objectification suggests an alternative world, perhaps material or perhaps spiritual, inhabited by creatures like us - only better, purer, stronger, and longer-lived. This is true for all religions except one: the religion of nature. For those who worship nature, the divine is not represented figuratively; it is simply what is already here and for which existing vocabulary is just fine for pointing to it directly. Animals, mountains, clouds, insects, whatever exists already within language itself is sacred. These are not called God, but gods or spirits or daemons, and they all exist as generic species not identities. For the nature worshipper, natural language conforms very nicely to the way the world is organised. There is nothing beyond language because language is natural and there is nothing beyond the natural world.
Nature worship has some intriguing properties. Because it is not dependent upon a fixed language, there can be no heresy. Because it can use any language, it is as culturally diverse as the world in which it is practiced. Because it evolves as the culture in which it occurs evolves, it is never out of date. And because it has no proper name for the divine, it is hated by other religions as a threat to their credibility. In one of the great religious ironies, proper name religions must single out language and deify it as something superior to all other things. Nature worshippers take language as it comes, equitably, along with everything else.
Annie Dillard is a nature worshipper. Her gods are everywhere - in the wren caught by her cat, in the cat itself, in the smells of the forest, in the presence of an infant, in the weather. There is no end to the detailed classifications of the deities that are there directly in front of us. She wants us to see these gods for what they are, manifestations of the divinely self-created World of Nature.
Nature-worshippers don’t pray; one can’t pray without an identity to which to direct one’s prayers. Nature-worshippers can only direct respect toward that which is - life, pain, death. “No gods have power to save.” Any proper name God who could save but didn’t could only be called a brutish monster. Nature doesn’t have monsters. Nature has materiality and it has forcefulness. “Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable... ”
Dillard, of course, doesn’t call herself a nature-worshpper. That would be impolitic. She is an environmentalist, a Green, an advocate for the natural world, a rejector of the Anthropocene, or any of a dozen or so other euphemisms. Since nature-worship doesn’t rely on doctrine, her religion is probably unique. As far as religions go, there are many worse than hers.
Holy the Firm is a metaphysical prose poem that doesn’t do what metaphysical poetry is usually meant to do, namely to suggest that which is beyond language. Religion is metaphysics ‘with intent.’ And Dillard certainly has intent. She wants us to be aware of her religion, which is neatly contained in her language.
Dillard’s book, like much of her other writing, is religious but with a difference. Religious poetry typically goes further than a statement of an abstract ‘beyondness’ by providing proper names, identities, like God, or Allah, or Jesus, or Vishnu or Zeus. All descriptions of such properly named entities are figurative, and, by definition, wrong because incomplete or misleading. Dillard’s poem does not do this. She doesn’t point elsewhere, beyond language; she points to the generic vocabulary which is within language already, things as they are experienced. This is a special kind of metaphysical poetry, and justifiably, I think, considered also as prose; and it says everything it needs to say. It points to Nature but only a collection of material beings, inanimate as well as living.
The use of proper names to ‘objectify’ the divine is what religious language, polytheistic as well as monotheistic, is traditionally about. Such objectification suggests an alternative world, perhaps material or perhaps spiritual, inhabited by creatures like us - only better, purer, stronger, and longer-lived. This is true for all religions except one: the religion of nature. For those who worship nature, the divine is not represented figuratively; it is simply what is already here and for which existing vocabulary is just fine for pointing to it directly. Animals, mountains, clouds, insects, whatever exists already within language itself is sacred. These are not called God, but gods or spirits or daemons, and they all exist as generic species not identities. For the nature worshipper, natural language conforms very nicely to the way the world is organised. There is nothing beyond language because language is natural and there is nothing beyond the natural world.
Nature worship has some intriguing properties. Because it is not dependent upon a fixed language, there can be no heresy. Because it can use any language, it is as culturally diverse as the world in which it is practiced. Because it evolves as the culture in which it occurs evolves, it is never out of date. And because it has no proper name for the divine, it is hated by other religions as a threat to their credibility. In one of the great religious ironies, proper name religions must single out language and deify it as something superior to all other things. Nature worshippers take language as it comes, equitably, along with everything else.
Annie Dillard is a nature worshipper. Her gods are everywhere - in the wren caught by her cat, in the cat itself, in the smells of the forest, in the presence of an infant, in the weather. There is no end to the detailed classifications of the deities that are there directly in front of us. She wants us to see these gods for what they are, manifestations of the divinely self-created World of Nature.
Nature-worshippers don’t pray; one can’t pray without an identity to which to direct one’s prayers. Nature-worshippers can only direct respect toward that which is - life, pain, death. “No gods have power to save.” Any proper name God who could save but didn’t could only be called a brutish monster. Nature doesn’t have monsters. Nature has materiality and it has forcefulness. “Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable... ”
Dillard, of course, doesn’t call herself a nature-worshpper. That would be impolitic. She is an environmentalist, a Green, an advocate for the natural world, a rejector of the Anthropocene, or any of a dozen or so other euphemisms. Since nature-worship doesn’t rely on doctrine, her religion is probably unique. As far as religions go, there are many worse than hers.
June 7, 2025
i think this felt like overwriting to me because i read the bulk of it right before bed. the last section, by contrast, was really beautiful, and every line connected. annie dillard is one of those writers you can tell—at a glance—agonizes over her prose. there is so much in and around her work to admire! 3.4/5 for now, needs a reread someday in the distant future.
December 29, 2011
Three days in the life of Annie Dillard.
Day One, November 18, "Newborn and Salted." She wakes up in a god ("every day is a god"), alone in her small dwelling in Puget Sound, Washington State, nature all around her. She has a cat named Small and a spider in her bathroom. She reads often. She writes what she sees: the moths dying into her burning candles, her cat, the spider in her bathroom and its kills, the land, the trees, the mountains, islands and the sea. She muses about time ("eternity's pale interlinear, as islands are the sea's. We have less time than we knew and that time bouyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild."). November 18 is a day, so it is a god, a god-child, newly-born and, like what the Armenians and the Levites of old did to their babies, salted. This god is a boy, "pagan and fernfoot," whose power is enthusiasm and whose innocence is mystery.
Day Two, November 19, "God's Tooth." A small plane falls to the earth, hits the ground, fuel explodes. Julie Norwich, seven years old, a neighbor's child, she who likes to play with Small and is learning to whistle, gets her face burnt off by the ignited plane fuel. With such horrifying third-degree burns, maybe she'll die. Or live dead to the world, never learning how to whistle, or kiss, and be kissed by a man who loves her, for her lips are gone. Faith wobbles. What kind of god is this day, asks Dillard. Maybe days are not really gods at all. "There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time's tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy." A bewildered cry like Job's--
"The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other--for world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."
That day Dillard espies a new island. She names it Terror, the Farthest Limb of the Day, God's Tooth.
Day Three, Friday, November 20, "Holy the Firm." Here is a thought, while reading about Esoteric Christianity. It is said that there is a substance--in the "spiritual scale"--lower than all the metals, minerals and earths known to anyone. Its name is Holy the Firm. It is in touch with the Absolute at base, and in touch with everything else upwards ascending to the Absolute. An unbroken circle of reality, eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, God having a stake guaranteed in all the world. Julie Norwich is in the hospital, fate uncertain, salted with fire. Dillard holds on to these ideas, by the single handful, of the Absolute, in touch with Holy the Firm, at its base, the latter in touch with everything, even those which appears senseless, seeing all the possibilities for the young child Julie Norwich: dead, alive and consecrated to God, or living a fairly normal life like everyone else.
Day One, November 18, "Newborn and Salted." She wakes up in a god ("every day is a god"), alone in her small dwelling in Puget Sound, Washington State, nature all around her. She has a cat named Small and a spider in her bathroom. She reads often. She writes what she sees: the moths dying into her burning candles, her cat, the spider in her bathroom and its kills, the land, the trees, the mountains, islands and the sea. She muses about time ("eternity's pale interlinear, as islands are the sea's. We have less time than we knew and that time bouyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild."). November 18 is a day, so it is a god, a god-child, newly-born and, like what the Armenians and the Levites of old did to their babies, salted. This god is a boy, "pagan and fernfoot," whose power is enthusiasm and whose innocence is mystery.
Day Two, November 19, "God's Tooth." A small plane falls to the earth, hits the ground, fuel explodes. Julie Norwich, seven years old, a neighbor's child, she who likes to play with Small and is learning to whistle, gets her face burnt off by the ignited plane fuel. With such horrifying third-degree burns, maybe she'll die. Or live dead to the world, never learning how to whistle, or kiss, and be kissed by a man who loves her, for her lips are gone. Faith wobbles. What kind of god is this day, asks Dillard. Maybe days are not really gods at all. "There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time's tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy." A bewildered cry like Job's--
"The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other--for world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."
That day Dillard espies a new island. She names it Terror, the Farthest Limb of the Day, God's Tooth.
Day Three, Friday, November 20, "Holy the Firm." Here is a thought, while reading about Esoteric Christianity. It is said that there is a substance--in the "spiritual scale"--lower than all the metals, minerals and earths known to anyone. Its name is Holy the Firm. It is in touch with the Absolute at base, and in touch with everything else upwards ascending to the Absolute. An unbroken circle of reality, eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, God having a stake guaranteed in all the world. Julie Norwich is in the hospital, fate uncertain, salted with fire. Dillard holds on to these ideas, by the single handful, of the Absolute, in touch with Holy the Firm, at its base, the latter in touch with everything, even those which appears senseless, seeing all the possibilities for the young child Julie Norwich: dead, alive and consecrated to God, or living a fairly normal life like everyone else.
May 29, 2011
This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Annie Dillard at her mesmerizing, rambling, inscrutable best. The theme of this book (and from what I've heard, she's claimed only one reviewer from Harvard has managed to figure it out) is less concrete than Pilgrim or An American Childhood, so it might be a frustrating read for those of us that require some...um...logical point to a book. (Personally, I'm not one of them. I'll happily float along, immersed in her amazing words and phrases, untroubled with thoughts of 'So, what exactly are you trying to say?' or 'Jeez! Not another foray into ancient Jewish law! Get on with it already!') This book is for people who enjoy the trip, not the destination. This is a book you meditate about rather than understand. Don't let the slight appearance fool you.
So many of the images have stayed with me over the years: the moth scene, Julie Norwich. These scenes are so well written, that they reach the level of incantations. You feel that you are in the vicinity of something otherworldly and foreign. Immense and Terrible. Something that could burn your eyes out or warp your soul.
An awe-inspiring book.
So many of the images have stayed with me over the years: the moth scene, Julie Norwich. These scenes are so well written, that they reach the level of incantations. You feel that you are in the vicinity of something otherworldly and foreign. Immense and Terrible. Something that could burn your eyes out or warp your soul.
An awe-inspiring book.
May 29, 2025
I remembered this one today. One of my favorite books ever!
I still remember how I felt reading this treasure many years ago.
Annie Dillard describes the earth the way a doctor might describe a condition: precisely, intimately, and without flinching. Every sentence is carved, not written. She observes the world with a microscopic lens and a cosmic heart, making even the smallest moment feel drenched in meaning.
In just under 80 pages, she contemplates beauty, suffering, creation, the vastness of the universe and God with writing that’s so intricate and luminous, it almost feels like prayer. Her prose is elliptical, spiraling, poetic.
This might be one of the most beautiful books EVER written!!!
I still remember how I felt reading this treasure many years ago.
Annie Dillard describes the earth the way a doctor might describe a condition: precisely, intimately, and without flinching. Every sentence is carved, not written. She observes the world with a microscopic lens and a cosmic heart, making even the smallest moment feel drenched in meaning.
In just under 80 pages, she contemplates beauty, suffering, creation, the vastness of the universe and God with writing that’s so intricate and luminous, it almost feels like prayer. Her prose is elliptical, spiraling, poetic.
This might be one of the most beautiful books EVER written!!!
November 7, 2018
I’m a big fan of any book that makes references to Julian of Norwich
February 27, 2020
" بَدونا متشابهتين بعض الشيء. وجهها الآن مشوّه، وأنا لا أتذكر وجهي. إنها أفضل النكات على الإطلاق، أننا هنا، وحمقى - أننا مبذورون في الزمن مثل حبوب قمح كثيرة جداً، أننا أرواح مرشوشة جزافاً كالملح في الزمن وذائبة هنا، مبثوثة في المادة، ومتصلة عبر الخلايا إلى أسفل أقدامنا، وتلك الأقدام مرجّح أن تصرعنا فوق جذر شجرة أو تسحقنا على حجر. النكتة في هذا أننا ننسى. أعطِ العقل ثانيتين لوحده، وسيظن أنه فيثاغورس. نصحو مئة مرة في اليوم ونضحك. "
October 29, 2016
I still love this book as much as I did first time around. Beautifully written with much to ponder! Best nature spiritual book ever!
March 1, 2017
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.
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:
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.
"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."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:
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.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.
July 30, 2012
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.
March 12, 2008
I read this book in a literary theory class as a sophomore in college, and it shook the very foundations of my thought. I know this sounds (and is) vague, but this is a book about EVERYTHING, written with poetic economy, concrete images, and, I imagine, some kind of grace. Dillard reflects on what it means to be an artist (it's being a nun, being a moth on fire, being a little girl burned, being a tired, burnt out writer), and in the process takes on time, mortality, and fury at the spitefulness of God, while trying, again and again, to move towards some kind of peace, all at the edge of the North American continent, the Puget Sound. I just can't convey what the experience of reading this book is like, except to say this: you must be willing to read slowly, out loud, and savor every word, because literally every word is important. Just a "wow" kind of a book, and, according to Dillard, her best.
September 9, 2024
This book is a gift. And exactly what I needed to read right now.
March 26, 2026
i felt like i needed to read this again and Holy the Firm never fails (though it was more of an unnerving read this time - not sure how i felt about the ending)
i need to read more dillard
i need to read more dillard
September 20, 2024
Confusing as you can believe, heartbreaking, and absolutely gorgeous. This book deals more honestly with the problem of God and pain than anything else I've ever read except Job.
The majority of the book is about a young girl whose face is badly burnt in a freak accident. From what I understand, it is based on a real event, but Dillard names her child Julie Norwich; her mother's name is Anne. Thus the child is Julie of Anne Norwich. This is interesting in that there was a fourteenth century mystic named Julianne of Norwich, most famous for her vision in which an angel came to her with something the size of a jewel in his hand. When she asked what it was, he replied "it is everything that was made." Thus God is outside time and views all things from all angles; "He's got the whole world in His hands." Julianne of Norwich also said "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well."
Probably you should read this book.
2019 note. The Julie thing: it's not 'the majority.' It's less than a third of the very short book. But the whole is better than I remembered, because of course it is.
The majority of the book is about a young girl whose face is badly burnt in a freak accident. From what I understand, it is based on a real event, but Dillard names her child Julie Norwich; her mother's name is Anne. Thus the child is Julie of Anne Norwich. This is interesting in that there was a fourteenth century mystic named Julianne of Norwich, most famous for her vision in which an angel came to her with something the size of a jewel in his hand. When she asked what it was, he replied "it is everything that was made." Thus God is outside time and views all things from all angles; "He's got the whole world in His hands." Julianne of Norwich also said "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well."
Probably you should read this book.
2019 note. The Julie thing: it's not 'the majority.' It's less than a third of the very short book. But the whole is better than I remembered, because of course it is.
February 2, 2020
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..
تأملات فريدة بترجمة فريدة..
January 13, 2022
"وأنا كنت أقرأ، وأغلي الماء، وأجدّد الشموع، وأعاود القراءة".
November 24, 2021
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.
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.
April 12, 2021
Nothing really happens in the book.
There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.
The main event is a plane crash in which a seven-year-old girl's face is horribly disfigured by the fire. This tragedy alone causes the narrator to experience a deep crisis. Holy the Firm is a metaphysical text, concerning the nature of reality, religion, love, longing, grief, death... and cats(?) :)
There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.
The main event is a plane crash in which a seven-year-old girl's face is horribly disfigured by the fire. This tragedy alone causes the narrator to experience a deep crisis. Holy the Firm is a metaphysical text, concerning the nature of reality, religion, love, longing, grief, death... and cats(?) :)
July 27, 2025
I salt my breakfast eggs. Every day I feel created
February 16, 2011
Just yesterday someone told me that Annie Dillard has said this is one of her least favorite books. Regardless, her self-standards are exceptionally high, and amongst our choices, her "worst" works must still be some of the most profound in thought and most unique in their creativeness.
I haven't read much Dillard, but each time I do, I am astounded by her attention to detail and by her ability to create shockingly clear images with words. Indeed, her gift for using words is beyond explanation. One must experience her writing to see that, truly, using words in unique combination allows her to express ideas in a way no one else ever has. It is almost as if she understands the world in another language and yet is able to translate this other understanding into English for those of us less gifted in vision.
Holy the Firm might blow out of your window and fly away on a windy day; it's a skinny little 76 pages, weighted with the contemplation of a much larger work. Dillard questions the injustices and sufferings of life without feeling obligated to express the skeptic's doubt in the power and goodness of God. I think she would say this is not our realm. Rather, we must realize our own responsibility, to observe, to blunder, to turn our heads and blink our eyes in constant awe. Humility and gratitude are mixed with honest but unaffected sorrow. One suspects that laughter may be both Dillard's way of expressing joy as well as a substitute for her tears. She does seem to be, as Van Morrison would say, one who has "let go into the mystery."
Some favorite quotes:
(To a little two year old boy) "Hullo, short and relatively new. Welcome again to the land of the living, to time, this hill of beans."
"I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed."
"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."
"There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows."
"Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and replenishing series of clouds."
I haven't read much Dillard, but each time I do, I am astounded by her attention to detail and by her ability to create shockingly clear images with words. Indeed, her gift for using words is beyond explanation. One must experience her writing to see that, truly, using words in unique combination allows her to express ideas in a way no one else ever has. It is almost as if she understands the world in another language and yet is able to translate this other understanding into English for those of us less gifted in vision.
Holy the Firm might blow out of your window and fly away on a windy day; it's a skinny little 76 pages, weighted with the contemplation of a much larger work. Dillard questions the injustices and sufferings of life without feeling obligated to express the skeptic's doubt in the power and goodness of God. I think she would say this is not our realm. Rather, we must realize our own responsibility, to observe, to blunder, to turn our heads and blink our eyes in constant awe. Humility and gratitude are mixed with honest but unaffected sorrow. One suspects that laughter may be both Dillard's way of expressing joy as well as a substitute for her tears. She does seem to be, as Van Morrison would say, one who has "let go into the mystery."
Some favorite quotes:
(To a little two year old boy) "Hullo, short and relatively new. Welcome again to the land of the living, to time, this hill of beans."
"I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed."
"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."
"There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows."
"Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and replenishing series of clouds."
September 26, 2015
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.
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.
January 4, 2016
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.
December 28, 2019
Abeit above my radar, i know this is very very good, just not my cup of tea.
January 7, 2008
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.
March 25, 2023
2023 Update
This year, I decided to read Holy the Firm once every month as part of a practice of returning to texts that have been formative for my understanding of my self in some significant way. I'd like to update this review along the way with some form of reflection.
January 2023: Returning here I am shocked at how resonant this language is with my interior monologue. These are phrases, words, and images that still run through my thoughts on a weekly, if not daily, basis, and in many instances I had forgotten where I found them originally here, in Annie's hard little book.
February 2023: Craft, craft, craft--all driving toward that final entry into a specific type of witness, the monastic (I'll be your nun, I already am now). When I was younger and reading this book, I read this as a kind of inscribed devotion following the extended meditation on the scorching of the divine, but older now, the text speaks more directly of confrontation and defiance (more Job 2.0) and the monastic mode carries with it an extension of trauma.
In my top ten all-time favorites. Dillard's prose is haunting. Moths have never seemed the same since.
This year, I decided to read Holy the Firm once every month as part of a practice of returning to texts that have been formative for my understanding of my self in some significant way. I'd like to update this review along the way with some form of reflection.
January 2023: Returning here I am shocked at how resonant this language is with my interior monologue. These are phrases, words, and images that still run through my thoughts on a weekly, if not daily, basis, and in many instances I had forgotten where I found them originally here, in Annie's hard little book.
February 2023: Craft, craft, craft--all driving toward that final entry into a specific type of witness, the monastic (I'll be your nun, I already am now). When I was younger and reading this book, I read this as a kind of inscribed devotion following the extended meditation on the scorching of the divine, but older now, the text speaks more directly of confrontation and defiance (more Job 2.0) and the monastic mode carries with it an extension of trauma.
In my top ten all-time favorites. Dillard's prose is haunting. Moths have never seemed the same since.
October 16, 2013
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!
September 25, 2016
Love her writing, but not the Christian god aspect of this one.
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April 8, 2023Video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNIfza...
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August 21, 2023i'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.
April 19, 2024
سرد تأملي شاعري.
الجميل هو رؤية دور النشر تترجم أنماطا جديدة من السرد خارج السائد.
الترجمة ممتازة.
الجميل هو رؤية دور النشر تترجم أنماطا جديدة من السرد خارج السائد.
الترجمة ممتازة.
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