Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

Holy the Firm Reviews

• 
  BlackOxford

  Nature Worship
  
  Holy the Firm is a metaphysical prose poem that doesn’t do what metaphysical poetry is usually meant to do, namely to suggest that which is beyond language. Religion is metaphysics ‘with intent.’ And Dillard certainly has intent. She wants us to be aware of her religion, which is neatly contained in her language.
  
  Dillard’s book, like much of her other writing, is religious but with a difference. Religious poetry typically goes further than a statement of an abstract ‘beyondness’ by providing proper names, identities, like God, or Allah, or Jesus, or Vishnu or Zeus. All descriptions of such properly named entities are figurative, and, by definition, wrong because incomplete or misleading. Dillard’s poem does not do this. She doesn’t point elsewhere, beyond language; she points to the generic vocabulary which is within language already, things as they are experienced. This is a special kind of metaphysical poetry, and justifiably, I think, considered also as prose; and it says everything it needs to say. It points to Nature but only a collection of material beings, inanimate as well as living.
  
  The use of proper names to ‘objectify’ the divine is what religious language, polytheistic as well as monotheistic, is traditionally about. Such objectification suggests an alternative world, perhaps material or perhaps spiritual, inhabited by creatures like us - only better, purer, stronger, and longer-lived. This is true for all religions except one: the religion of nature. For those who worship nature, the divine is not represented figuratively; it is simply what is already here and for which existing vocabulary is just fine for pointing to it directly. Animals, mountains, clouds, insects, whatever exists already within language itself is sacred. These are not called God, but gods or spirits or daemons, and they all exist as generic species not identities. For the nature worshipper, natural language conforms very nicely to the way the world is organised. There is nothing beyond language because language is natural and there is nothing beyond the natural world.
  
  Nature worship has some intriguing properties. Because it is not dependent upon a fixed language, there can be no heresy. Because it can use any language, it is as culturally diverse as the world in which it is practiced. Because it evolves as the culture in which it occurs evolves, it is never out of date. And because it has no proper name for the divine, it is hated by other religions as a threat to their credibility. In one of the great religious ironies, proper name religions must single out language and deify it as something superior to all other things. Nature worshippers take language as it comes, equitably, along with everything else.
  
  Annie Dillard is a nature worshipper. Her gods are everywhere - in the wren caught by her cat, in the cat itself, in the smells of the forest, in the presence of an infant, in the weather. There is no end to the detailed classifications of the deities that are there directly in front of us. She wants us to see these gods for what they are, manifestations of the divinely self-created World of Nature.
  
  Nature-worshippers don’t pray; one can’t pray without an identity to which to direct one’s prayers. Nature-worshippers can only direct respect toward that which is - life, pain, death. “No gods have power to save.” Any proper name God who could save but didn’t could only be called a brutish monster. Nature doesn’t have monsters. Nature has materiality and it has forcefulness. “Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable... ”
  
  Dillard, of course, doesn’t call herself a nature-worshpper. That would be impolitic. She is an environmentalist, a Green, an advocate for the natural world, a rejector of the Anthropocene, or any of a dozen or so other euphemisms. Since nature-worship doesn’t rely on doctrine, her religion is probably unique. As far as religions go, there are many worse than hers.
• 
  Kend

       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.
• 
  Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly

  Three days in the life of Annie Dillard.
  
  Day One, November 18, "Newborn and Salted." She wakes up in a god ("every day is a god"), alone in her small dwelling in Puget Sound, Washington State, nature all around her. She has a cat named Small and a spider in her bathroom. She reads often. She writes what she sees: the moths dying into her burning candles, her cat, the spider in her bathroom and its kills, the land, the trees, the mountains, islands and the sea. She muses about time ("eternity's pale interlinear, as islands are the sea's. We have less time than we knew and that time bouyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild."). November 18 is a day, so it is a god, a god-child, newly-born and, like what the Armenians and the Levites of old did to their babies, salted. This god is a boy, "pagan and fernfoot," whose power is enthusiasm and whose innocence is mystery.
  
  Day Two, November 19, "God's Tooth." A small plane falls to the earth, hits the ground, fuel explodes. Julie Norwich, seven years old, a neighbor's child, she who likes to play with Small and is learning to whistle, gets her face burnt off by the ignited plane fuel. With such horrifying third-degree burns, maybe she'll die. Or live dead to the world, never learning how to whistle, or kiss, and be kissed by a man who loves her, for her lips are gone. Faith wobbles. What kind of god is this day, asks Dillard. Maybe days are not really gods at all. "There are only days. 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 hugeness and idiocy." A bewildered cry like Job's--
  
  "The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other--for world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."
  
  That day Dillard espies a new island. She names it Terror, the Farthest Limb of the Day, God's Tooth.
  
  Day Three, Friday, November 20, "Holy the Firm." Here is a thought, while reading about Esoteric Christianity. It is said that there is a substance--in the "spiritual scale"--lower than all the metals, minerals and earths known to anyone. Its name is Holy the Firm. It is in touch with the Absolute at base, and in touch with everything else upwards ascending to the Absolute. An unbroken circle of reality, eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, God having a stake guaranteed in all the world. Julie Norwich is in the hospital, fate uncertain, salted with fire. Dillard holds on to these ideas, by the single handful, of the Absolute, in touch with Holy the Firm, at its base, the latter in touch with everything, even those which appears senseless, seeing all the possibilities for the young child Julie Norwich: dead, alive and consecrated to God, or living a fairly normal life like everyone else.
• 
  Taghreed Jamal El Deen

  " بَدونا متشابهتين بعض الشيء. وجهها الآن مشوّه، وأنا لا أتذكر وجهي. إنها أفضل النكات على الإطلاق، أننا هنا، وحمقى - أننا مبذورون في الزمن مثل حبوب قمح كثيرة جداً، أننا أرواح مرشوشة جزافاً كالملح في الزمن وذائبة هنا، مبثوثة في المادة، ومتصلة عبر الخلايا إلى أسفل أقدامنا، وتلك الأقدام مرجّح أن تصرعنا فوق جذر شجرة أو تسحقنا على حجر. النكتة في هذا أننا ننسى. أعطِ العقل ثانيتين لوحده، وسيظن أنه فيثاغورس. نصحو مئة مرة في اليوم ونضحك. "
• 
  Mickey

  This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Annie Dillard at her mesmerizing, rambling, inscrutable best. The theme of this book (and from what I've heard, she's claimed only one reviewer from Harvard has managed to figure it out) is less concrete than Pilgrim or An American Childhood, so it might be a frustrating read for those of us that require some...um...logical point to a book. (Personally, I'm not one of them. I'll happily float along, immersed in her amazing words and phrases, untroubled with thoughts of 'So, what exactly are you trying to say?' or 'Jeez! Not another foray into ancient Jewish law! Get on with it already!') This book is for people who enjoy the trip, not the destination. This is a book you meditate about rather than understand. Don't let the slight appearance fool you.
  So many of the images have stayed with me over the years: the moth scene, Julie Norwich. These scenes are so well written, that they reach the level of incantations. You feel that you are in the vicinity of something otherworldly and foreign. Immense and Terrible. Something that could burn your eyes out or warp your soul.
  An awe-inspiring book.
• 
  Lela

  I still love this book as much as I did first time around. Beautifully written with much to ponder! Best nature spiritual book ever!
• 
  MyLan

  I’m a big fan of any book that makes references to Julian of Norwich
• 
  Daniel Chaikin

  12. Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
  published: 1977
  format: 72 page hardcover, large print edition
  acquired: inherited from my neighbor upon his move
  read: Feb 26
  rating: 4
  
  Read this in a sitting. It's an experience, but one I find very difficult to explain without showing by quoting a lot.
  
  The first part is a self-absorbed praise of every tiny detail of life. She opens "Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time." She goes through an intense bending of language and reality, an almost surreal and poisoned optimism.

  "The God of today is rampant and drenched. His arms spread, bearing moist pastures; his fingers spread, fingering the shore. He is time’s live skin; he burgeons up from day like an tree. His legs spread crossing the heavens, flicking hugely, and flashing and arcing around the earth toward night."

  Then in part two there is a plane crash, a small plane with a father and 7-yr-old daughter. Both survive, but the girls face is burned off. A sobering clash with the opening. Having contradicted her optimism, she looks, in the third and final part, for a way forward and looks to god and holiness in various concepts, touching heavily on Catholicism and some of its more obscure philosophies. She is, I imagined, looking to find something to hold all this together.
  
  Thought provoking and exhausting, a poem in prose, magical and also not. I think this is one that could be read over and over, as one might a poem, perhaps with some reverence.
  
  Some more quotes:
  
  On bringing communion wine:

  Here is a bottle of wine with a label, Christ with a cork. I bear holiness splintered into a vessel, very God of very God, the sempiternal science personal and brooding, bright on the back of my ribs.

  And, just because I love this line:

  The hedgerows ... leafless stems are starting to live visibly deep in their centers, as hidden as banked fires live, and as clearly as recognition, mute, shines forth from eyes.

  
  
• 
  Michael

  This slim volume electrified and astounded me with its depth and poetry. Dillard writes of her time spent in a one-room shack on an island in Puget Sound in northeast Washington with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person". With marvelous metaphors and surprising turns of phrase, this prose poem explores the eternal in the particular and vice versa, reaching for a solution for the paradoxes evident in the most common perspectives of our place in the universe. The view of God acting only occasionally in our world begs the question of the emptiness of the rest, while the pantheistic view of immanence throughout undercuts reality in a different way. A tragedy that befalls a young girl in the community (terrible facial burning in an airplane accident), as well as more mundane intimations of mortality from moths in candle flames and predations of spiders and cats, provide the stimulus for pondering the fragile aspect of existence. She strives well to portray a vision of the world creating itself and reaches toward a conception of the "Absolute" as something present at the most fundamental levels of matter, time, and space, which she calls "Holy the Firm". But "These are only ideas, by the single handful" and "What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the alter but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are?" This book will linger in my mind for a long time. Powerful and spiritually enlightening, even for an atheist such as me.
• 
  بثينة الإبراهيم

  أحب الكتب التي تصنف في "امتداح العزلة"، العزلة التي تجعل المرء يرى كثيرًا من الأمور العادية رؤية مختلفة، يغدو متبصرًا، ويمتلك القدرة على النفاذ إلى دقائق الكون والذات.
  تأملات فريدة بترجمة فريدة..
• 
  Haytham

  "وأنا كنت أقرأ، وأغلي الماء، وأجدّد الشموع، وأعاود القراءة".
• 
  Marjan Nikoloski

  Nothing really happens in the book.
  There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.
  The main event is a plane crash in which a seven-year-old girl's face is horribly disfigured by the fire. This tragedy alone causes the narrator to experience a deep crisis. Holy the Firm is a metaphysical text, concerning the nature of reality, religion, love, longing, grief, death... and cats(?) :)
• 
  J Douglas

  This is one of the top five books that have shaped my life. The person who gave it to me told me to read it twice. That was amazing advice. The first read was beautiful. It was obviously packed with symbolism I wasn't quite apprehending and it was jammed to the gills with gorgeous florid language and vibrant imagery. (Oh, and by 'jammed to the gills' I mean that by the time you are a few pages in you can not help but see how she has already begun to knit words together so that everything references at least one other thing in the book as well, if not three other things. Water, land, time, eternity, salt, wax, trees, and fire burning with or without light.) all of this rich interconnection of ideas is not just for poetic fun, it tears away shrubs that hide the hardest questions of human suffering, beautifully.
  
  As I was saying, In the first reading I thought it was pretty, a brightly colored creature. Then the second reading stung me like brightly colored creatures are prone to do.
  
  To avoid spoilers, I will just say that after the second read I closed the book to discover I had been crying and my heart, racing. I sat it down to find I was already praying a prayer I couldn't seem to quit: that I would become part of God's answer to the suffering in this world.
  
  To say the book has changed me is....adorable. When I opened the book the first time I was a depressed graduate student, when I set it down the second time, I was a nun with her face on fire.
  
  Now I read it once a year.
• 
  Neil R. Coulter

  I don't think I'll ever understand the appeal of Annie Dillard's writing. I have tried so many times.
• 
  Longfellow

  Just yesterday someone told me that Annie Dillard has said this is one of her least favorite books. Regardless, her self-standards are exceptionally high, and amongst our choices, her "worst" works must still be some of the most profound in thought and most unique in their creativeness.
  
  I haven't read much Dillard, but each time I do, I am astounded by her attention to detail and by her ability to create shockingly clear images with words. Indeed, her gift for using words is beyond explanation. One must experience her writing to see that, truly, using words in unique combination allows her to express ideas in a way no one else ever has. It is almost as if she understands the world in another language and yet is able to translate this other understanding into English for those of us less gifted in vision.
  
  Holy the Firm might blow out of your window and fly away on a windy day; it's a skinny little 76 pages, weighted with the contemplation of a much larger work. Dillard questions the injustices and sufferings of life without feeling obligated to express the skeptic's doubt in the power and goodness of God. I think she would say this is not our realm. Rather, we must realize our own responsibility, to observe, to blunder, to turn our heads and blink our eyes in constant awe. Humility and gratitude are mixed with honest but unaffected sorrow. One suspects that laughter may be both Dillard's way of expressing joy as well as a substitute for her tears. She does seem to be, as Van Morrison would say, one who has "let go into the mystery."
  
  Some favorite quotes:
  
  (To a little two year old boy) "Hullo, short and relatively new. Welcome again to the land of the living, to time, this hill of beans."
  
  "I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed."
  
  "There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times."
  
  "There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows."
  
  "Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and replenishing series of clouds."
• 
  J. Alfred

  Confusing as you can believe, heartbreaking, and absolutely gorgeous. This book deals more honestly with the problem of God and pain than anything else I've ever read except Job.
  The majority of the book is about a young girl whose face is badly burnt in a freak accident. From what I understand, it is based on a real event, but Dillard names her child Julie Norwich; her mother's name is Anne. Thus the child is Julie of Anne Norwich. This is interesting in that there was a fourteenth century mystic named Julianne of Norwich, most famous for her vision in which an angel came to her with something the size of a jewel in his hand. When she asked what it was, he replied "it is everything that was made." Thus God is outside time and views all things from all angles; "He's got the whole world in His hands." Julianne of Norwich also said "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well."
  Probably you should read this book.
  
  2019 note. The Julie thing: it's not 'the majority.' It's less than a third of the very short book. But the whole is better than I remembered, because of course it is.
• 
  Stephen C.

  Abeit above my radar, i know this is very very good, just not my cup of tea.
• 
  Praxedes

  This is a glorious non-fiction book. Dillard takes the quotidian and turns it into poetry. Her description of fealty is a sublime mix of joy and terror. Her descriptions are so lovely the reader often forgets she is writing about pain, or agony, or death. This book is not religious but is overflowing with faith. Do yourself a favor and check it out!
• 
  Jenny

  In my top ten all-time favorites. Dillard's prose is haunting. Moths have never seemed the same since.
• 
  Bibliophile10

  This is heady, abstract, concrete, brilliant, and beautiful. At times I feel the essayist has meandered away from her readers, but I am happy trying to follow.
• 
  Amanda

  Love her writing, but not the Christian god aspect of this one.
• 
  Christopher McCaffery

  I guess I'd rather read Proust, or Scripture.
• 
  Polly Beats

  'We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.'
  
  One can count on Annie Dillard for Spiritual/metaphysical recalibration and a heavy dose of stepping back and seeing reality for what it is, or isn't—'reality checks' abound in her work.
  
  'How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
  What can any artist set on fire but his world?'
  
  This was my second reading of this petite poetic novella. I am positive I'll be reading it again someday.
• 
  Christian Engler

  In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard certainly can not be accused for excess verbiage. Her little book, consisting of less than eighty pages, is a thoughtful and sometimes intense investigation into the soul. One can almost imagine her staring deeply at a flowing river or a particular kind of tree and genuinely seeing Divinity in and around it, authentically feeling it and being transportated to the nether reaches of the unexplained. Yet, it is a good place or moment where nothing can touch you or hurt you. It is the zone where you have that elongated, never ending epihany. However, in Holy the Firm, she has that exact moment or moments, citing a couple of specific occasions and or happenings: a moth engulfed in a candle flame, a child severely burned in an airplane mishap and lastly, a baptism on a chilly day on a beach. Her stabbing gaze and visual processing is an inherent endowment for us all but very seldom used, sad to say. Each example that she bethinks, on the surface, looks violent and harsh and horrible. But behind that mask of the unpleasant, there is profound cheer at the transformation of the perception, of soul development, and yes, of course, of the logical, humanistic and psychological plain of thought processing, filtering and transforming. The essay, in no uncertain terms, conveys a kind of WOW factor that says, I don't really know how this whole thing operates, but isn't it amazing nonetheless? The deity of God has to be here, right in front of our very eyes, every moment, every instance, every half second. Holiness is under a rock, in people, in nature, in moments (good and bad), one giant gelatinous glob with so many tags and definitions attached to it. But only the Holy makes it cohesive and function. This work is not so little in its implications and gratitude. There is a majesty here, an august celebration. And we're all in it together, a gem of a book!
• 
  Nick Swarbrick

  I think Holy the Firm is one of the hardest reads I’ve done for a long time. It wasn’t enjoyable-but the insights were often joyful; it wasn’t technically complex writing - but the ways ideas of landscape and beauty and the Divine fold in on themselves are astonishing. If the first essay, which sets the tone, is shocking (beautiful and engaged but somehow dispassionate as Dillard watches a moth burn in a candle flame), the second draws the reader more deeply into the mysteries she Is exploring. True to her style, there are passages where Augustine meets Wordsworth: “The god of today is a child... He thrives in a cup of wind, landlocked and thrashing.” In the second part we meet the subject of her meditation on human suffering, Julie Norwich, and Dillard’s despairing theodicy: “God despises everything, apparently... a brute and a traitor.”
  It is in the final, eponymous essay that all this comes together. It would truly be a spoiler - odd to think of essays needing this decision- to say how the author resolves (or doesn’t resolve) her lines of argument, but the opening of essay three is both an indication of her faith and an exhibition of her writing power: “I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation’s dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs." Simply awe inspiring.
• 
  Kevin Spicer

  "The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything firm, or is time on the loose?"
  
  Spirituality is always at the tip of our tongue. We know, or have remembered, that it requires engagement with the elements, embodiment in living. We want to find springs and lap water into buckets, see it spilling into light, we want to build fires and feel the darkness at our backs. But the world is in endless motion, our lives refuse stillness. And after all this, what do we make of violence? If we can start from Christian assumptions about God, his goodness and love, how can we look the world in the eyes and not retreat toward a limited or a distant view of God? How can we keep this taste on our tongues without reduction and abstraction?
  
  So, like Isaiah with coal touched lips, Annie Dillard writes, she writes about the mountains and the sea of Puget Sound, she writes in movements, with a building sense of motion, simple sights become oddly hinged, almost wrecked. She writes about random violence, a plane crashes, a little girl's face is badly burned. How pain seems to be the only clear and unfading reality, the powerlessness of love. And she writes, finally, incredibly, about God and her desire to worship him.
  
  This is a brilliant book and benefits from multiple readings. The writing is poetic, a highly variable rhythm, tending toward the unwieldy and chaotic. I found it personally clarifying and exciting on a number of fronts.
• 
  Laura

  Yesterday I felt like going to the Arboretum and reading some Annie Dillard, so I chose this book and a lovely maple to sit by and enjoyed both very much. I won't explain here what this book is about, because finding out what it is about was part of what made this short book so enjoyable. Dillard wrote this book while she was living in Puget Sound and, like in
  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, writes a clever mixture of reflections on nature, God, and various fascinating facts that she has read about the world and/or philosophy. This combination wouldn't work for most authors, but she is so great at it that it really works. The book is moving and profound, but written in such an earthy way that it didn't feel pretentious. I recommend it as a good afternoon or short vacation read.
• 
  Scott

  I read this much too fast and will read it again soon.
  
  I feel like Dillard's work, and this book in particular, is to writing what impressionism is to painting. I don't always get it, but I love it. I wish I could write like her.
  
  She lost me at points, but blew me away at others. Not a long enough book to get bogged down in either. Must be I am trying to sell my favorite authors tonight, but I feel like this one would be a decent taste of Dillard for those who can't quite get into her otherwise: short, enough rewarding images and accessible passages to make it worth it.
  
  I love this, about 10 pages in, out of nowhere and it's own paragraph:
  "Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language at the corner where eternity clips time."