43 pages • 1 hour read
Annie DillardHoly the Firm
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Newborn and Salted”
Part 1, Pages 11-19 Summary
Dillard’s account of her time in Puget Sound begins on November 18 with a written meditation on the nature of “god.” Dillard suggests that “[e]very day is a god, each day is a god” (11), that god is in the arms that surround her as she wakes up, and that god is Puget Sound. Dillard’s conception of god continues to expand until it reaches the entire Pacific before she returns to the gods of particular days, envisioning the actions of November 18’s god. Dillard then turns to Small, a cat who stays with Dillard and has recently undergone a surgical operation. Dillard draws a connection between the sound Small makes while licking her sutures and the way “the sky clicks securely in place over the mountains” (12). This connection affirms the day’s reality.
Dillard provides an account of the other animals that inhabit her cabin. She pays particular attention to a spider who has taken up residence behind her toilet. The spider, for whom Dillard uses feminine pronouns, subsists on a diet of earwigs, sow bugs, and moths. Dillard takes particular care in describing the desiccated exoskeletons left over from the spider’s meals and treats the spider’s molted exoskeleton with the same attention. Upon seeing the moths’ bodies, Dillard falls to her knees and recalls an event from two years previous.
She remembers staying in the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading by candlelight, and watching moths continually fly into the candle’s flame (15). As Dillard watched the creatures burn or get their hot wings stuck onto various surfaces, she considered helping them, but decided against it. In the morning, she found that the moths have escaped. Dillard goes on to describe a golden female moth who self-immolated in the candle’s flame. Dillard found herself transfixed by the process, and describes it in minute detail from the moment the moth found herself stuck until its head, wings, and legs had all disintegrated in the flame. After a brief meditation on the moth’s life, Dillard considers its afterlife as a “moth-essence” (17), which continued to burn until Dillard extinguished the flame two hours later.
Back in the present, Dillard affirms her identification of the husks that lie under the spider’s web as moths. The burning moth, which she associates with Rimbaud’s burning passion for poetry, then reminds Dillard of the writing classes she has taught. She briefly wonders about her students’ willingness to sacrifice for their writing before her attention returns to the candles burning in the present day. Dillard explains that she never extinguishes the candles before falling asleep.
Part 1, Pages 19-24 Summary
Dillard opens by using the Cascade Range both as an object of contemplation and as a geographic landmark around which everything else in the world orients itself. Seeing the mountain reminds Dillard of her mission in coming to Puget Sound, which is “to study hard things—rock mountain and salt sea—and to temper my spirit on their edges” (19). The affirmation of her mission quickly turns to prayer, and Dillard compares the Cascade Range with other North American mountains, framing them as the western borders of the world. Dillard also basks in the sheer scale of these mountains and sees them as not only geological but culturally influential objects. She considers that if the ancient Greeks had Mount Baker instead of Mount Olympus, “[T]heir large and honest art would have broken, and they would have gone fishing” (20).
Part of the mystery that Dillard finds in these mountains is that, despite her conception of them as the Ultima Thule, or the western borders of her known world, she must look east from her place in Puget Sound to see them. This creates a contradiction in her mind that leads her to conclude that she “must be in no place at all” (20). The rising sun and the fact that she casts a shadow, however, forces Dillard to reconsider the idea that she is in no place. She then concludes that there must be more to the world than she previously thought and hesitantly faces west toward those unknown areas. There, Dillard spots more islands—so many islands and so much water that she loses her breath. Seeing this vast expanse of ocean, she struggles to remember Virginia. In her mind, she moves forward into the ocean. The ratio of land and water that she sees before her becomes a synecdoche for the surface area each occupies on the Earth. While she makes this comparison, Dillard associates the water with eternity and the land with time.
Dillard turns back to reflect on her room, which she sees as a “skull” (21-22). Acknowledging the room’s aesthetic qualities, she proceeds to consider various kinds of spiritual professions, including nuns, thinkers, and artists, as well as their aesthetic living conditions (22). Dillard then concludes that since one of her room’s walls is a large window, she is part of the landscape, which she then describes as “point[ing] to sea” (23). After a long, romantic description of the landscape, however, Dillard can no longer pretend to see all that she describes. Rather, she confesses that she has “never cared” about her physical surroundings and prefers to read instead (23).
Dillard lists a number of things that she has read, including a medieval manuscript whose illuminated pages she compares to the view from her window. She then reiterates that where she is, there is “one country, one room, one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person: but I am hollow” (24). She contrasts these singular things with the many gods that opened the book.
Part 1, Pages 24-34 Summary
After reflecting on the book’s substance thus far, Dillard states that “Nothing is going to happen” in it except for small, linguistic violences (24). Dillard turns to reading, and relates information about the ritual uses of salt in a number of Abrahamic religions. Dillard considers the salt on her breakfast and takes a moment to witness the signs of creation in herself, sheep, gulls, and her meal. Dillard is creating a map of the islands that she observes from her room, and she labels the map according to the names a sailor has provided. On November 18, Dillard spots a new island. She marks the island on her map and leaves it unnamed.
Dillard remembers Knut Hamsun’s line that he writes “to kill time” and finds it amusing (26). Her laughter startles Small the cat, who carries a dead wren into Dillard’s room. Dillard takes the dead wren in her hand, observes it for a moment, and then drops it from the porch for Small—or some scavenger—to find. Dillard goes inside but shortly afterward hears a commotion on the porch. She finds Small again, this time carrying a tiny god in her mouth. The god is in the shape of a proportionate, winged man; his hair is aflame and his wings burned and smoking. Small retreats from Dillard, who picks the god up and extinguishes the flames. The god, drawing energy from the sun, is eventually able to fly again.
The little god perches on Dillard’s shoulder that night as she takes a walk, whistling music into her ear. The god’s music, despite its simplicity, reifies objects and shapes the world. Dillard comes across a road leading to a hill that comes into existence as Dillard views it. Though Dillard seems aware that a self-creating hill is an illusion, she is unable to shake it. She wonders if the stars over the hill are also an illusion. Realizing that she is in a dream, Dillard attempts to see the ocean, but the land envelops her before she can. The road she was walking then becomes familiar.
Dillard meditates on the nature of time. Where she once felt that time was running low, she is now content with the amount of time she is given. She sees the day’s god as a “child” (29)—not fully developed, but growing through mundane interactions. Dillard relates a brief conversation with Terry Wean, who takes her course on poetry. Then Dillard returns to bed, calls Small to her, and reads. As she does so, the day’s god grows until he becomes a boy: innocent, enthusiastic, and “everything.”
Part 1 Analysis
The first part of Holy the Firm, “Newborn and Salted,” lays the thematic foundation for the rest of the work. Dillard does not leave her room during the first part of this book—except in her memories—but the objects and creatures she finds about her reflect her universe in microcosm. This connection between the micro and the macro foreshadows the types of considerations and conclusions that Dillard makes later in the work—particularly her theses about the interconnected order of the universe. Rhetorically, Dillard illustrates these connections through synecdoche: a literary device that substitutes a part for a whole, as in Dillard’s use of the land and water she sees to represent all the land and water on Earth,
In keeping with her later emphasis on how the world reflects itself at scale, Dillard begins the book with the idea that “[e]very day is a god, each day is a god” (11). Later, Dillard affirms that these gods coexist, stating, “[T]here are the many gods of mornings” (24). The use of the lowercase g in “god” and the indefinite article “a” both suggest that Dillard’s conception of the divine exists within a polytheistic system. Later on in the work, Dillard uses the proper, capitalized noun “God” as a way of differentiating the Christian god from these presumably lesser, daily gods. While the capital-G God expresses himself through mysterious forces, the daily gods express themselves through the land and their connection with it. These gods vary in scale and in their degree of connection with the land, but the fact of their connection with the material is explicit from the very first description. Dillard states that the god “is Puget Sound, the Pacific, his breast rises from the pastures; his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders” (12), continuing until there is no way to differentiate between the two concepts.
Dillard states her reason for coming to Puget Sound as “to study hard things—rock mountain and salt sea—and to temper [her] spirit on their edges” (19). The way she conflates the land and the divine from the very beginning of her account suggests that these “edges” are not only harsh physical realities, but also the kinds of hard spiritual truths she engages with throughout the text. Supporting this are Dillard’s use of the word “spirit” and her quick turn to prayer after describing her mission. The word “edges” suggests that Dillard sees these truths as best learned through extreme circumstances, just as the “rock mountain” and the “salt sea” represent the two extremes of earthly elevation. The word “edges” also suggests either overlaps or gaps where the physical and spiritual meet. This is what Dillard refers to when she later says, “Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam” (21). This idea of something coming after or beyond the known, material world resonates with Dillard’s reference to Ultima Thule, an antiquated term for a place that was believed to be at the borders of the known world. Dillard, then, situates herself among a variety of different edges, the most prominent of which is where God’s supposed benevolence meets the universality of suffering.
In Part 1, Dillard’s exploration of earthly suffering focuses on the suffering of nonhuman animals. Though Small the cat is the first character introduced, Dillard sympathizes more with the spider “in the bathroom, with whom [she keeps] a sort of company” (13). While Dillard casts Small out before eating, she allows the spider to stay and eat in the same interior space as Dillard. In fact, Dillard both watches the spider eat and humanizes “her” by commenting on “Her little outfit” (13), referring to the spider’s web. Seeing the insect corpses scattered about her bathroom floor make Dillard reflect on the moths “two summers ago” that “kept flying into the candle” (15). Her decision to not intervene and help the “snagged moths” despite watching their attempts to “struggle free” suggests that Dillard has little sympathy for the suffering of these creatures.
However, the one moth that gets caught in the candle’s wax and burned “as a wick” earns her respect (17). Unlike the other moths, Dillard sees this one’s suffering as spiritual: The moth’s body “widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk” (17). The imagery foreshadows not only the plane crash of Part 2 but also—in its self-sacrificial aspect—what Dillard will later describe as Jesus’s suicidal “descent” to Earth. She also sees the moth as a creature worthy of human concerns. Dillard takes a moment to consider the moth’s life, whether she was “new, or old,” and if she had “done her work” (16-17). This “work” is perhaps aesthetic as well as spiritual, as Dillard senses something artistic in the moth’s immolation and reads of how Rimbaud “burnt out his brains” by the light of the moth burning (17). The moth’s burning head, then, symbolizes poetic creation of the kind that takes place in Dillard’s room, which she describes in a similar fashion: “[T]his room is a skull, a fire tower, wooden, and empty” (22).
Dillard shows less sympathy for the wren that Small kills. Though she takes time to describe the creature’s “dead wings point[ing] askew on the circular rug” (26), the image’s similarity to a clock face causes Dillard to laugh. She observes the dead bird for a moment before dropping it from her porch. However, after a “ruckus on the porch,” the bird returns in the image of “a god, scorched” (27)—another allusion to Jesus as a dying god. The god is a small man, perfect “[s]ave for his wings” (27), which were likewise the only things “askew” on the bird (26). Like the flaming moth, Dillard’s room, and Rimbaud, the god’s head is on fire. This time, however, Dillard puts the god’s flames out.
Most of the creatures that Dillard depicts—even the god—suffer in small ways. At other times she takes care to list all the living things she sees as “created” (25). Though she does not explicitly state the question in the first part of Holy the Firm, it appears here implicitly on the “edge” of these two ideas: If creatures are created by a divine hand, why are they forced to suffer? Dillard’s suggestion, through the association between the dead bird (who appears to her as a clock, or “time”) and the suffering god seems to be that time is the cause of this suffering.
However, Dillard is hesitant to make any concrete claims. She acknowledges that her visions at times appear to her as “illusions” and that her descriptions of things are disconnected from what she actually sees (23). By the end of Part 1, all she can do is reaffirm what she knew at its beginning: that the world is singular yet multiple and that the divine works on many levels (30). The day’s god, however, has changed as the day progressed. Instead of Puget Sound, the god appears as “a child, a baby new and filling the house” (29). This apparent rebirth after a baptism of fire establishes a pattern that will become more prominent in the next two parts.
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