Word: dillard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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HOLY THE FIRM by Annie Dillard Harper & Row; 76 pages...
There is a moment in Holy the Firm when Annie Dillard watches a candle flame consume a golden female moth. The moth's abdomen catches in the wet wax and her wings "ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing." Her antennae crackle, her legs disappear and her body is reduced to a glowing shell. "And then," relates Dillard, "this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick ... She burned for two hours, until I blew...
...moth and the flame is an old device that Dillard uses in a fresh manner...
Similar intense descriptions of nature stamped Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard's 1975 Pulitzer-prizewinning book...
From her retreat on the edge of Washington State's Puget Sound-"one room, one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person"-Dillard gazes out at nature and sees beyond the molecular realities ("Each thing in the world is moving, cell by cell") and even beyond Emerson's transcendental glorification to mull a final unknown: "Did Christ descend once and for all to no purpose, in a kind of divine and kenotic suicide, or ascend once and for all, pulling his cross up after him like a rope ladder home...