Holy the Firm. Annie Dillard

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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

       www.canongate.tv

      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

       Part Two: God’s Tooth

       Part Three: Holy the Firm

       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 The Day on Fire, a novel about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen; I was hoping it would do it again. So I read, lost, every day sitting under a tree by my tent, while warblers swung in the leaves overhead and bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet; and I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.

      Moths kept flying into the candle. They would hiss and recoil, lost upside down in the shadows among my cooking pans. Or they would singe their wings and fall, and their hot wings, as if melted, would stick to the first thing they touched—a pan, a lid, a spoon—so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings, triangles of shiny dust here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water, and replenished candles, and read on.

      One night a moth flew