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| |  | Faculty Items | Home » » Holy the Firm | | | | | | | Description: | | In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire. This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well. | | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780060915438
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Annie Dillard | | Paperback:
| 80 pages | | Publisher:
| Harper Perennial | | Publication Date:
| September 01, 1988 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0060915439 | | Package Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.3 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 20 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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MysticalApr 12, 2010
Our UU minister read some passages from this book. I got hold of a copy reasonably priced and in excellent condition. Dillard gets close to the mystical even though there were only words to transmit her experience. It's a book to keep.
A wordsmith's work on beauty and agonyAug 04, 2009
Poetry slips between folds of time and space. It traverses places that aren't places. Having breathed transcendent air, upon its return poetry exhales over us like dandelion seeds on a gusty afternoon.
Dillard's opening piece breathes these seeds. I read two pages before stopping, starting again, and re-reading the entire section (all 30 pages) aloud. Each word is sewn seamlessly to the one after. It is surely some of the most stunning writing I've read.
"Into this world falls a plane," opens section two abruptly. Amid such beauty, "the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face." Dillard wrestles through questions of God and how He can juxtapose such beauty and agony. She writes, "Is there no link at the base of things, some kernel or air deep in the matrix of matter from which universe furls like a ribbon twined into time? Has God a hand in this?"
The book offers no clear resolve. I imagine Dillard leaves us to enter into those places that aren't places ourselves. Admittedly, she plunges deeper than I could grasp. Yet I think Dillard approaches all this much the same as the moth from section one: she flew into a candle, ignited and spasmed, "and then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick.... She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning--only glowing within."
I still mull over Dillard's work. Her book is certainly beautiful. While not all beauty is true, there are smatterings of truth throughout. Though tiny in stature (at only 75 pages), this book paints with grand strokes. Well worth reading.
goodMar 05, 2009
if u don't want to think, forget about this book. becaust it makes u think, or it's nothing.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
My favorite book of all timeFeb 25, 2008
This has been my favorite book ever since I read it in 1994. Its perfection is other-worldly. If you are a Dillard novice, better to start with "An American Childhood," to get a sense of the author and her style. It is about growing up, experiencing wonder, becoming fully alive. "Holy the Firm" borders on a spiritual meditation; some of my friends have found it too abstract. Whatever you do, steer clear of "The Maytrees," Dillard's most recent book--it doesn't measure up.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 A small, rather opaque work of beauty.Feb 10, 2008
Annie Dillard is a creator of writing that frequently works like poetry trapped in prose's body. This little offering, in three jewel-like parts, is rather like her more extended "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek": a gorgeous and unflinching experience of the natural world, an angry wrestling with the problem of suffering and a theological discussion in light of these two other preoccupations. The theology in "Holy the Firm" is thus grounded in trauma and reality but expressed in heady, spinning, sometimes impenetrable language that highlights the mysteries within her subject but at the same time obscured for me what attitudes of the heart or mind she had come to at the end of her struggles. I finished the book still feeling rather angry myself and, perhaps unsurprisingly, unsatisfied.
Recommended (especially the hilarious description of Sunday in a small Episcopalian Church).
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