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ALSO BY ANNIE DILLARD
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)
Living by Fiction (1982)
Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984)
An American Childhood (1987)
Writing Life (1989)
The Living (1992)
Mornings Like This (1995)
For the Time Being (1999)
The Maytrees (2007)
The Abundance (2016)
HOLY
the
FIRM
ANNIE DILLARD
Published by Canongate Books in 2016
Copyright © Annie Dillard, 1977
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States of America in 1987 by Harper & Row, Publishers, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York NY 10007
A portion of this work originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
First published in the US in 1977 by
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78211 772 8
Designed by Suni Manchikanti
for Gary
CONTENTS
PART ONE
NEWBORN AND SALTED
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.
I wake in a god. I wake in arms holding my quilt, holding me as best they can inside my quilt.
Someone is kissing me—already. I wake, I cry “Oh,” I rise from the pillow. Why should I open my eyes?
I open my eyes. The god lifts from the water. His head fills the bay. He is Puget Sound, the Pacific; his breast rises from pastures; his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders. Islands slip blue from his shoulders and glide over the water, the empty, lighted water like a stage.
Today’s god rises, his long eyes flecked in clouds. He flings his arms, spreading colors; he arches, cupping sky in his belly; he vaults, vaulting and spread, holding all and spread on me like skin.
Under the quilt in my knees’ crook is a cat. She wakes; she curls to bite her metal sutures. The day is real; already, I can feel it click, hear it clicking under my knees.
The day is real; the sky clicks securely in place over the mountains, locks round the islands, snaps slap on the bay. Air fits flush on farm roofs; it rises inside the doors of barns and rubs at yellow barn windows. Air clicks up my hand cloven into fingers and wells in my ears’ holes, whole and entire. I call it simplicity, the way matter is smooth and alone.
I toss the cat. I stand and smooth the quilt. “Oh,” I cry, “Oh!”
I live on northern Puget Sound, in Washington State, alone. I have a gold cat, who sleeps on my legs, named Small. In the morning I joke to her blank face, Do you remember last night? Do you remember? I throw her out before breakfast, so I can eat.
There is a spider, too, in the bathroom, with whom I keep a sort of company. Her little outfit always reminds me of a certain moth I helped to kill. The spider herself is of uncertain lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab. Her six-inch mess of a web works, works somehow, works miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed. The web itself is in a corner behind the toilet, connecting tile wall to tile wall and floor, in a place where there is, I would have thought, scant traffic. Yet under the web are sixteen or so corpses she has tossed to the floor.
The corpses appear to be mostly sow bugs, those little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in houses, and die round. There is also a new shred of earwig, three old spider skins crinkled and clenched, and two moth bodies, wingless and huge and empty, moth bodies I drop to my knees to see.
Today the earwig shines darkly and gleams, what there is of him: a dorsal curve of thorax and abdomen, and a smooth pair of cerci by which I knew his name. Next week, if the other bodies are any indication, he will be shrunken and gray, webbed to the floor with dust. The sow bugs beside him are hollow and empty of color, fragile, a breath away from brittle fluff. The spider skins lie on their sides, translucent and ragged, their legs drying in knots. And the moths, the empty moths, stagger against each other, headless, in a confusion of arcing strips of chitin like peeling varnish, like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral domes, like nothing resembling moths, so that I should hesitate to call them moths, except that I have had some experience with the figure Moth reduced to a nub.
Two summers ago I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. I had hauled myself and gear up there to read, among other things, James Ramsey Ullman’s
