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Summary Of Holy The Firm By Annie Dillard

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Books are a handwritten or printed work of fiction or nonfiction that provide people with knowledge, entertainment, and also inspiration. “Holy the Firm” and “The Writing Life” are non-fiction books written by Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard is a well-known American writer who wrote some famous books such as “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” and “For the Time Being.” In “Holy the Firm,” Annie Dillard lives in a peaceful cabin on the island in Washington state. At that time, she asked herself about the relationship between a nature, suffering, purity and god, and finally she wrote this book in three days of god that she is thinking about. In “The Writing Life,” Dillard wrote about her perspective on the learning to be a writer …show more content…

Sometimes, readers can find some sentences that look complex and seem like difficult to understand in Dillard books, but you can get it quite easy if you read it again or think about it deeply. “Dillard’s place in the contemplative tradition is quite a bit more complex, however. In 1977, her long essay Holy the Firm appeared… the essay builds up its force by assembling various narratives and philosophical forays in distinctly nonlinear ways” (Wilde 31). However, Dillard’s books not only have difficult sentences but have a direct and easy to understand. Some sentences seem like easy but still keep deeply meaning for reader to think about it. For example, “a well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ''do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,'' the writer said, ''I don't know… do you like sentences?'' (Dillard 70). This one is so easy to read that is a question about being a writer, but the real meaning is quite deep to find out. She wants to tell the readers that if you choose to be a writer, you have to love it first because stay with the sentences for all of your life. “The language is so sharp and clean, each word so carefully chosen. Nouns and verbs do the work and her choice of words continues to astonish, to surprise; as if she is trying not so much to describe the world as she is to reflect or to paint it” (Mayo 1). Everything shows reader that she chooses the word so carefully and manage her sentences so

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Dillard’s purpose is to inform the reader of how to develop a larger range of our vision in order to get new perspectives on how to live life. She introduces logos to get to ethos. Dillard uses many interesting facts like in “Fixed”, “The female will mate with and devour up to seven males”(Dillard 60) and “If a bee is heavy with honey, the wasp drinks by licking the tongue of her unfortunate victim”(Dillard 60). The facts prove that there are intricate details about everything. The authors desired outcome is to make people want to open their minds and look more abstractly in their lives.

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In this quote, Holling speaks about how Mrs. Baker gave him an exceedingly complicated sentence to diagram, while the other students received fairly simple sentences. The sentence that he was given seemed to be so long and so complex that it appeared that even the man “who wrote it couldn’t diagram it,” which displays that the sentence is clearly very intricate. This quote is definitely a distinct reason why Holling might assume Mrs. Baker hates him. Since Mrs. Baker provided a much more complex sentence to him than she did for the rest of class, that shows that Mrs. Baker wants to almost “torture” Holling.

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