Word: dillard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Keith County Journal, a collection of essays about desolate Nebraska grasslands, has already invited comparison with such lapidary works as Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book belongs in that company. Like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand, Professor Janovy discerns universes in the creeks, bogs and fields of the Sandhills country. He makes the reader care for creatures as large as the great blue heron, as small as the inch-long plains killifish, and as obscure as the parasites of the genus Trich-odina that...
...deserted IAB, paused for a second in surprise, and mused "Hey, this is a famous place. It's been a great win." WAGNER FG FT REB PF AST TP DiDonna 6-10 2-3 6 3 1 14 Lewis 5-11 0-0 5 3 0 10 Dillard 0-0 0-1 2 1 3 0 Aponte 8-13 1-2 6 4 3 17 Jimonez 2-4 1-1 1 2 1 5 Ciampaglio 9-18 4-7 3 2 5 22 Johnson 6-14 2-2 4 3 6 14 Totals...
Holy the Firm follows Dillard's monastic routine - teaching, musing at her window, walking to a village store to buy Communion wine for her church - and transforms it into a metaphysical journey...
...first there reigns a state of newborn innocence, snuffed out suddenly by the burning of a neighbor's child in a plane crash. "God is a brute and traitor, abandoning us to time," writes Dillard. She despairs of earthly happiness: "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 . . ." But in the end, she witnesses a baptism that heralds her own reawakening of faith. One Christian sect, she reads, posits a substance known as "Holy the Firm...
...pilgrims of the spirit can avoid sounding cheaply pious or painfully oversincere. Dillard's literary salvation is tier sense of wonder and intensity. Sometimes she is ostentatious, as in her description of the Pacific coastline, "the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam." But at their best, Dillard's sentences have a clean, penetrating edge. "The higher Christian churches," she writes, "come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism. . . as though they knew what they were doing ... If God were to blast such a service to bits...