northerly_heart_reads's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
makennadykstra's review against another edition
5.0
“Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading at dawn fast over the mountain split”
“How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion for only the good is real. […] The pain within the millstones pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other—for world and all the products of extension—is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. […] you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.”
“And learn power, however sweet they call you, learn power, the smash of the holy once more, and signed by its name. Be victim to abruptness and seizures, events intercalated, swellings of heart. You’ll climb trees. You won’t be able to sleep, or need to, for the joy of it. […] Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God.”
“How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion for only the good is real. […] The pain within the millstones pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other—for world and all the products of extension—is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. […] you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.”
“And learn power, however sweet they call you, learn power, the smash of the holy once more, and signed by its name. Be victim to abruptness and seizures, events intercalated, swellings of heart. You’ll climb trees. You won’t be able to sleep, or need to, for the joy of it. […] Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God.”
grimondgalgmod's review against another edition
5.0
"What can an artist set on fire but his world...His face is flame like a seraph's, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt. He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home."
A poetic treatise on God, nature, and time influenced by esoteric Christianity and Jewish mysticism that I was not expecting at all but am wholly here for. I need to read more Dillard.
A poetic treatise on God, nature, and time influenced by esoteric Christianity and Jewish mysticism that I was not expecting at all but am wholly here for. I need to read more Dillard.
danjewett's review against another edition
5.0
My father once made a gift of this book to me, and I still remember being transformed by the beauty of it.
I lost the original copy he gave me, but I was able to replace it today.
Last week I re-read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It fits in with a recent inclination to read personal accounts by gifted observers of the natural world. Writing by Thoreau, Annie Dillard, John McPhee (Encounters With the Archdruid is a wonderful book) has gotten me through another lonely winter.
I lost the original copy he gave me, but I was able to replace it today.
Last week I re-read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It fits in with a recent inclination to read personal accounts by gifted observers of the natural world. Writing by Thoreau, Annie Dillard, John McPhee (Encounters With the Archdruid is a wonderful book) has gotten me through another lonely winter.
ricefun's review against another edition
5.0
Dillard is a genius in language, the pictures she creates of God, the world, others and herself are haunting and gorgeous. This thin book is nice to read in one sitting, and I will return to it several times I think.