Holy the Firm Book

     Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm is a classic.  By that, I mean a lot of things.  This slender volume--only seventy-six pages!--includes her famous moth essay, which I was required to read in my second year of college, and which I required my students to read in their first.  It's a good essay.  Apart from being an instrument of learning (or torture, depending on the student you're talking to), Holy the Firm is classic for another reason: it deals with the classic (or universal) question of suffering.  Dillard spent over a year crafting these seventy-six pages, even though the observations they record took place over only three days.

     Some scholars suspected Dillard of being high while writing this book, and I can well see why: the language is so elevated, the tone so enthusiastic, and the dialectic between head and heart so amplified, that she seems to have spun out of this earth's orbit entirely.  She accomplishes the nonfiction writer's primary goal, and makes the familiar unfamiliar.  I, for one, do not suspect her of imbibing hallucinogenics.  What of those fourteen months spent drafting so few pages?  I suspect Dillard was obsessing over her craft, and tinkering with verbs.  I cannot escape them; they enfold me, beat me round the head.  I am continually surprised when I re-read a passage and find Dillard using ordinary words and ordinary structures; her arrangements are precise and powerful, carefully calculated for maximum effect.  She makes me giddy with words.

     Dillard is, after all, a poet.

     I must force myself to look at this book through the lens of a student, too, and of someone who will be expected to connect the dots between Holy the Firm and the subject of the interior journey.  Sometimes Dillard herself asks the necessary questions.  Questions of existence ("Why are there all these apples in the world, and why so wet and transparent?" [65]), of reality ("But how do we know--how could we know--that the real is there?" [48]), of worthiness ("Who are we to demand explanations of God?" [62], and "Who am I to buy the communion wine?" [63]), and of God's identity and how we figure in ("Has he no power?" [43], and "The question is, then, whether God touches anything.  Is anything firm, or is time on the loose?" [47]).  Unlike Boethius, who I spent the other half of my day reading, Dillard doesn't make Philosophy some exterior person and begin a lengthy dialogue.  She keeps Philosophy on a tight leash, interrogates herself, and drowns her reader in impressions.  The questions crystallize into story, and Dillard's energetic self seizes upon the exterior world as a metaphor for her inner life.  A pipe is not a pipe, a cat is not a cat, and pain is transformation's other face.

     Dillard has a terribly modest view of the artist (and therefore, the writer--and therefore, herself): she writes, "What can any artist set on fire but his world? ... His face is flame like a seraph's, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt.  He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned" (72).  So you see, she is unafraid to state what all artists think but rarely feel free to broadcast: we are just so awesome, aren't we?  I'm afraid I find this kind of self-gratifying back-patting to be rather a boost to my ailing ego--but I can't stand by it, if only because I've run out of matches and my kindling is damp.  I cannot think of myself as a lynchpin for global change--but hey, it's kind of a nice thought, and well in keeping with Dillard's go-gettum attitude.  This world does not go quietly into the good night of her senses; it leaves its impressions with all of the rough and tumble fierceness of a tomcat's duel, and all of the sharp clear pain that loss and love can muster.