Holy the Firm

“The day is real; already I can feel it click, hear it clicking under my knees.”

“Real” is one of the few words in Dillard’s account that takes on a non-conventional meaning. The suggestion that the day is real because Dillard “can feel it click” points toward the phenomenological, experiential definition of reality that Dillard later establishes. This sentence is also an example of Dillard’s use of repetition.

“Her six-inch mess of web works, works somehow, works, miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed.”

Another example of Dillard’s use of repetition to meditate on a topic or word, this sentence is also an example of zeugma. Zeugma is when one word, in this case “keep,” applies to two or more words with vastly different meanings. In this case, Dillard uses zeugma to juxtapose the web’s ability to keep the spider alive and to keep Dillard amazed. Since this sentence only makes logical sense with the first meaning—what amazes Dillard is that the web keeps the spider alive—and not the second, this quote illustrates how zeugma can be used to make logical leaps.

“Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work?”

Dillard’s repetition here is similar to poetic anaphora, where a poet opens multiple lines with the same word or phrase. Here, Dillard uses it to consider and sympathize with the moth, asking questions about whether it had a full life before it burned. These questions could also apply to Julie Norwich and to Dillard herself.

“The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk.”

This sentence is an example of Dillard’s use of symbols and metaphors to communicate her experience. The reference to “saffron” suggests both monetary and spiritual value, and this sense resonates with the idea of an “immolating monk.” The moth, in this way, is made both rich and glorious in its self-immolation.

“She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flamed-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

Continuing Dillard’s description of the burning moth, this sentence lays the foundation of the connection between the moth and Julie. Both, in different senses, are “flame-faced virgin[s],” and both inform Dillard’s engagement with literature. The juxtaposition of opposing images—light and fire with “wet” darkness—also underscores the relationship between spiritual enlightenment, suffering, and sacrifice in Holy the Firm.

“I came here to study hard things—rock mountain and sea salt—and to temper my spirit on their edges.”

This is perhaps the closest thing Dillard gives to a mission statement: The book hinges on this idea that engagement with “hard things,” or the raw materials of land and life, will strengthen the spirit. The idea of “edges” suggests that the study of earthly materials will reveal gaps through which Dillard will glimpse the spiritual realm, or the real. The line seemingly alludes to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—another work about nature and enlightenment—and its well-known statement, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach” (Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Project Gutenberg. 28 Jan. 2021).

“But the mountains are, incredibly, east. When I first came here I faced east and watched the mountains, thinking, These are the Ultima Thule, the final westering, the last serrate margin of time.”

Despite the optimism of the previous quote, these sentences suggest that even the material realm is unstable and difficult to pin down, particularly if one grapples with it using outdated notions. The reference to Ultima Thule demonstrates the old Latinate tradition that Dillard attempts to use as a guide to the world.

“The actual percentage of land mass to sea in the Sound equals that of the rest of the planet: we have less time than we knew. Time is eternity’s pale interlinear, as the islands are the sea’s.”

This quote demonstrates how Dillard sees the world as ordered and interconnected. Just as Puget Sound’s land stands in synchedocal relationship with the entire world’s ratio of land to water, time itself is a string of tiny islands on an ocean of eternity. Water here comes to symbolize eternity, an idea later picked up on in Dillard’s vision of Christ.

“Armenians, I read, salt their newborn babies. I check somewhere else: so did the Jews at the time of the prophets.”

Salt and the various forms of baptism play essential roles in Holy the Firm. From this reference to the history of salt in baptismal rites, to Christ’s baptism in the salt water of Puget Sound and Julie’s baptism in fire salts, salt continues its long history as a way to protect oneself from evil. This quote also exemplifies Dillard’s frequent asides communicating information from other texts she has read.

“Henry Miller relates that Knut Hamsun once said, in response to a questionnaire, that he wrote to kill time. This is funny in a number of ways. In a number of ways I kill myself laughing, looking out at islands.”

Another example of Dillard’s allusion to information outside of her experience in Puget Sound, this quote establishes the basis of Dillard’s meditation on the purpose of writing. This quote also demonstrates Dillard’s ecstatic engagement with the natural world, “laughing, looking out at islands,” and foreshadows the loss of self she later feels exploring those landscapes.

“The hill creates itself, a powerful suggestion. It creates itself, thickening with apparently solid earth and waving plants, with houses and browsing cattle, unrolling wherever my eyes go, as though my focus were a brush painting in a world. I cannot escape the illusion.”

Dillard’s descriptions of the natural world paint them as alive, constantly in motion, and generating themselves. This quote is perhaps the most direct example of Dillard’s experience of landscape as a living organism, at least outside of her discussion of the daily gods that manifest themselves through these places. This is also one of the first suggestions that the world that Dillard experiences is only an “illusion.”

“There was no reason: the plane’s engine simply stilled after takeoff, and the light plane failed to clear the firs. It fell easily; one wing snagged on a fir top; the metal fell down the air and smashed in the thin woods where cattle browse; the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face.”

This discussion of the reasons—or lack thereof—for Julie’s plane falling from the sky provides the backdrop for Dillard’s understanding of suffering as senseless and random. Staccato clauses separated by semicolons suggest that these events simply follow one another without causal links, mirroring Dillard’s perception of events. Dillard’s syntax also breaks in the last clause, suggesting a breakdown of sense and order.

“She saw me watching and we exchanged a look, a very conscious and self-conscious look—because we look a bit alike and we both knew it; because she was still short and I grown.”

This quote establishes the connection between Dillard and Julie that recurs throughout the book. This connection is essential to understanding the book’s conclusion and demonstrates, on a number of levels, how interconnected Dillard sees the world as being. This interconnection is reflected in the repetition and resonances that structure the book.

“You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy.”

In this quote, the “gag” that Dillard refers to is the “gag of the universe,” or the underlying absurdity that results in the suffering she explores throughout the text. These kinds of right turns also evoke the way that Dillard structures Holy the Firm. The constant shifting of narrative focus as visions and events occur to Dillard could be seen as right angles that ultimately lead to a coherent theology.

“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 rudeness and idiocy.”

The reference here to “The one great god” is particularly interesting due to Dillard’s choice of capitalization. Unlike the other instances in which the God that rules over the gods of days is capitalized, representing the Christian God, this god is uncapitalized despite being “The one great god.” This complicates Dillard’s metaphysics, but it may simply suggest that Dillard is attempting to lower God’s stature by making him less significant—a response to the ideas she grapples with about the limits of God’s power.

“‘Abandon everything,’ Dionysius told his disciple, ‘God despises ideas.’”

Dillard’s engagement with old theological notions leads her down many paths. This example represents the first step that Dillard takes toward humbling herself and placing less stock in the power of ideas. This quote comes at the climax of Dillard’s book and provides her with the context she needs to move away from theoretical frameworks and toward faith.

“Faith would be that God is self-limited […] that he bound himself to time and its hazards”

Faith becomes an essential element of Dillard’s theology halfway through the second part of Holy the Firm. Here is the first instance in which Dillard draws conclusions from faith in God’s benevolence rather than from her ideas about his powerlessness. The thought she arrives at—a god bound by time—becomes an essential element of the work and perhaps explains her engagement with Christianity specifically, since Christianity posits that God (as Jesus) did in fact enter into human time and suffering.

“The universe is neither contingent upon nor participant in the holy, in being itself, the real, the power play of fire. The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun—but also its captives, bound by the mineral made ropes of our senses.”

These few lines encapsulate Dillard’s conception of human experience as an illusion and her ideas about the universality of human suffering. Dillard’s reality is not what the “mineral made ropes of our senses” perceive, but the spiritual truths that lie behind those perceptions. Dillard’s reference to the human senses as “mineral made” creates a strong dichotomy between material life and spiritual understanding. The suggestion is that “mineral made […] senses” are inadequate tools to glean spiritual knowledge.

“I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand”

This line, which mirrors Socrates’s famous statement that all he knows is that he knows nothing, demonstrates Dillard’s resolve to abandon knowledge in favor of faith and revelation. This line opens the third part of Holy the Firm and reaffirms Dillard’s belief in God’s benevolence. Through the phrase “by any means ready to hand,” it also suggests that Dillard is no longer as concerned about the gaps between the physical and spiritual; she has decided that the means available are enough.

“This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery.”

Though Dillard has humbled herself before God, she is still fascinated by the way that time relates to the world as she experiences it. This line demonstrates that Dillard has not completely abandoned ideas but has instead chosen to focus them on matters outside of the divine. Still, her humility comes through in the admission that “it is mystery.”

“In the high churches they saunter through liturgy as certain works which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.”

Dillard generally identifies with the worshipers at high churches, so it is particularly noteworthy that she here sees those people as arrogant and ignorant of God’s power. Dillard’s spiritual investigations throughout Holy the Firm have questioned and engaged with God in similarly unromantic ways. The third part of the book, in fact, marks Dillard moving away from intellectual engagement and toward the reverence and fear seen in lower churches. As the last line of this section states, the knowledge of God’s power and irreverence for human forms and theories is “the beginning of wisdom.”

“I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth’s contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone. And I am gone.”

These lines represent Dillard’s own baptism as she is drawn into the “drop” of water and bears witness to the incomprehensible movements of time. Unlike Christ, whom Dillard describes as baptized in the waters of Puget Sound, Dillard’s baptism is a violent affair that shakes her very conception of self. This loss of self, particularly when framed by the images of “faces pouring past” her, connects Dillard with Julie, whose baptism by the exploding fuel risks violently reshaping her life.

“Look how he loves you! Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room? Wait till they hand you a mirror, if you can hold one, and know what it means. That skinless, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil. There are two kinds of nun, out of the cloister or in.”

Dillard’s consideration of Julie at the end of the book attempts to situate her as a religious figure destined to live a spiritual life because of the way the universe has treated her. Julie’s burn marks become a “veil,” and the plane crash evidence of God’s love. Dillard suggests that this realization—that Julie is destined to live a life devoted to God—is common sense and that Julie “will know what it means” once she is able to see her face. This of course is not true, and the references to “a sterilized room” and nuns “out of the cloister” both seem to point back at Dillard, writing this narrative in her room.