Holy the Firm

Small, the cat who lives with Dillard in Puget Sound, plays a number of essential roles in Holy the Firm. Dillard does not appear to have a close relationship with Small. She even refuses to eat in the same room as the cat, “throw[ing] her out before breakfast, so [Dillard] can eat” (13). This refusal to eat in the same room as Small is particularly interesting because it is juxtaposed with Dillard’s fascinated meditation on the spider’s dietary habits.

One of the main differences between Small and the creatures with whom Dillard sympathizes (such as the spider, the moth, or even Julie) is that Small seems to be an exception to the kind of absurd suffering that Dillard focuses on in her narrative. In fact, Small is often an agent of that suffering rather than its victim. Small’s role in the universe’s suffering is, of course, small; it is best represented by the “wren she has killed” (26). Unlike the spider, who eats her victims to sustain her own life, Small seems to kill randomly and without desire to consume her victims. The wren is untouched other than its “dead wings point[ing] askew on the circular rug” (26). The connection between the bird’s wings and a clock face may also suggest that Small represents the kind of violence that time commits. The connection between Small and time is clearer when she brings in “a god, scorched” (27). One of Dillard’s main threads, particularly in the second part of the book, relies on the idea that gods too are subject to time (43).

If Small is understood to be an antagonistic agent who does not suffer but instead creates suffering, Julie’s attempts to stuff Small into “a black dress long and full as a nun’s” suggest Julie’s own efforts to master these forces and her ability to turn Dillard’s ideas of suffering “upside down” (40).

The moth that Dillard witnessed fly into a candle, get “caught, burnt dry, and held” is the key figure in Dillard’s Part 1 investigation of suffering. Dillard uses the figure of the moth to make a number of connections between fire, sacrifice, and artistic creation that are later explored through their relationship with Julie Norwich and Dillard herself.

Unlike the other moths that Dillard had witnessed singe their wings, the moth that grabbed Dillard’s attention and sympathy got trapped by the wax until the wings “widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk” (17). Dillard’s connection between the moth and an “immolating monk” suggests that she sees the moth’s act as a kind of spiritual sacrifice, and this sense is redoubled when she describes it as “a flame-faced virgin” and “a hollow saint” (17). Dillard also (and relatedly, given the relationship Dillard sketches out between art and spirituality) sees the moth’s immolation as an artistic act akin to her own act of writing in “a skull, a fire tower, wooden, and empty” (22). Though the moth is no longer a relevant figure once Julie appears, the associations that Dillard makes between the moth, fire, and holy sacrifice carry through to the end of Holy the Firm.