Word: dillard
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...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...
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...