Annie Dillard redux

After reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I decided to give Annie Dillard's other writing a try.  When Holy the Firm was published in 1977, some readers wondered if she had been taking hallucinogenic drugs while writing the book (she indicated that she had not).  I can see why those questions arose, and I''m not going to award this book inclusion in the recommended books subcategory of this blog, but I will share several favorite passages and a few words:

"It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools - that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right own to your feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone.  The joke part is that we forget it.  Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras.  We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.

The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead.  It all comes together.  In a twinkling.  You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy.  One step on the rake and it's mind under matter once again.  You wake up with a piece of tree in your skull.  You wake up with fruit on your hands.  You wake up in a clearing and see yourself, ashamed.  You see your own face and it's seven years old and there's no knowing why, or where you've been since.  We're tossed broadcast into time like so much grass, some ravening god's sweet hay.  You wake up and a plane falls out of the sky."     [the last sentence being a real-life event that triggered the writing of this book]

"When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick?  When the candle is out, who needs it?"

"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?"   When I saw "kenotic" I presumed it was related to "keynote/importance".  But the word is the adjectival form of kenosis, the Greek term referring to "the relinquishment of divine attributes by Jesus Christ in becoming human."  Totally new word for me (Dillard was raised Catholic and later became "spiritually promiscuous.")

"By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it evolve?"  To lay hold of, to seize.  Related to prehensile and presumably to comprehend.

"It is morning: morning! and the water clobbered with light."  Pounded mercilessly.

"The more accessible and universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism: that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else."  Apparently "a flowing or entering in."  But I think she is using (or creating) the noun form of the adjective immanent ("naturally existing as part of something").

"You might as well be a nun.  You might as well be God's chaste bride... Look how he loves you!  Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room?...  Learn Latin, an it please my Lord, learn the foolish downward look called Custody of the Eyes."