Holy the Firm

While attending Western Washington University I had the great good fortune to take a poetry class from Annie Dillard. My own poetry was abysmal and she gave me this advice, "writing is like prayer; you sit and listen for the still small voice." She had won the Pulitzer prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and was in the process of writing Holy the Firm while at Fairhaven College at Western. She read us the bits about the moth and the flame. This is her slenderest book, but the one in which she most takes her own advice. It's prose that reads like poetry. This is a book that makes me think that everything else I've ever read was only approximate use of language to convey some idea. In this book it seems like every word is carefully chosen, as if it comes from some place of meditation, of listening to a still small voice. It's a very human book, for all the sparks of the divine. By another accident I heard her read from it at the University of Washington. The final passage seemed to rise to a climax and hang in the air. No one spoke, no one left. It was one of those magical moments. Holy the Firm is all one piece and can be read through in one sitting as one experience. It's very much a writer's book, and I see most of the reviews are by writers finding some echo in a fellow writer. Some reviewers have put much better than I what it's about. I merely suggest that Dillardians (and other readers) may enjoy this oft-overlooked book.

I was attracted initially to this book based on Dillard's other works and the idea that she holed herself up in the Puget Sound area for a couple of years to think things through. Wow. Maybe more of us should stop and watch and think and write for a couple years. There is an almost imperceptible inner longing that runs throughout this book. I imagine Dillard working very hard over every word and that effort comes through to the reader in the depth of each sentence. She's not always accessible and I know people who just can't get through her books. I don't argue - she's rarely breezy and always deep but I always find her writing to be satisfying and challenging. A rare gem.

I don't like using words like "perfect" but I think it is warranted here. This is an incredibly literate piece of work, in which not one single word has been wasted. Each time I read it I come away exhililrated & humbled by Dillard's mastery of language & the enormous depth of scholarship that lies behind every line and every metaphor. This is writing by someone drunk on language & learning, try not to stuff it into any pre-conceived notions of literature -this is music. Dillard has crafted a classical symphony for us in which certain movements come back over and over in variations of harmony and melody that will sweep you away. Now, that being said, I must also say that it seems that half my best students love Dillard & half hate her. Very little in between. Yesterday one of my brightest (who loves Dillard) threw up her hands and said "Now I hate her, I will have to spend seven years reading to know what she is saying". Yes, of course! but the joy of Dillard's immersion in Anglo-American theology and literature is that she draws you along -it isn't name dropping, thesefolks have been useful to her & she wants us to come too. Read Holy The Firm with Eliot's Four Quartets in the other hand, then you can have a go at Johnson, Martin Luther.... AND YOU WILL!

Annie Dillard is one of those writers who is all or nothing. Many people don't "get" her and find her bewildering. But to some of us, she speaks to some unspoken hunger in our souls that we never knew we had. The year after a personal tragedy I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm incessantly, finding in Dillard's thoughts and imagery a necessary verbalization of my pain and spiritual confusion. She is able to capture in one short phrase the complex muddle of emotions found at certain times in one's life and the reader knows that she's been there. To filch a line from another book: "When one walks in the shadow of insanity, the finding of another footstep on the sand is something close to a blessed event." I do not exaggerate when I say Holy the Firm saved my mind. This is not to say that Dillard is all gloom-and-doom. Many of her lines are extremely witty and can make you burst out laughing with her insight and sardonic humor. Either she clicks with you or she doesn't. But for those of us with whom she does, Dillard is wonderful.

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm transcends the genres of poetry and essay as fluidly as it does the disciplines of philosophy and religion. Her writing is lucid and inspiring and this tiny volume contains more insight and wisdom than virtually any other modern text I've encountered. I'd highly recommend this book to any reader, in hopes that Dillard's unique writing style and her spirited intellect can bring to others the same inspiration they have brought me.