SOURCE: "Annie Dillard: Narrative Fringe," in Contemporary-American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick, University Press of Kentucky, 1985, pp. 51-63.

[In the essay below, Scheick discusses the narrative structure of Dillard's works and the junctions she creates between elements in her narrative.]

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery," says Annie Dillard at the beginning of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). This remark is a thesis statement, not only for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek but also for Dillard's Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), Holy the Firm (1977), and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982). So inscrutable is this mystery of creation, Dillard explains, that the best one can do in life is to "discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek): "There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Seeing is everything for Dillard: "All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up. prop my eyes open, with toothpicks" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). In her writings, her Thoreauvian "meteorological journal[s] of the mind" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), Dillard seeks to awaken the reader to a new way of seeing, to make the reader undergo a radical change of vision tantamount to a conversion experience; "I am not making chatter," Dillard warns, "I mean to change his life" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

This new perception in the reader is evoked by Dillard's language. Language, however, is an ambiguous instrument. On the one hand, "seeing is … very much a matter of verbalization" for Dillard, who says, "unless I call attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). On the other hand, she notes later in her first book, "the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Reconciling these two remarks is not easy. In the latter comment Dillard stresses the paradox of language; language focuses on, and at the same time inadvertently veers away from, that which is seen. Language displaces the perceived object and in this sense conceals what it tries to reveal: "In order to make a world in which their ideas might be discovered, writers embody those ideas in materials solid and opaque, and thus conceal them." This ambiguous capacity of language to reveal and conceal mimics nature, which also, according to Dillard, "does reveal as well as conceal" some mystery. Especially the mystery of natural beauty appears to be a "language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

For Dillard, language is important as language, however vexing its failure to signify things as they are. The mysterious matrix between seeing and not seeing that constitutes verbalization is, for Dillard, intrinsically artful. For her the matrix of language "is a selection and abstraction from unknowable flux"; "language is itself like a work of art" insofar as "it selects, abstracts, exaggerates, and orders" (Living by Fiction). Implicitly artful, language achieves its highest ends for Dillard when it is directed by a writer to function within a still more encompassing artful structure designed to awaken a reader to the mystery of natural beauty. "Art is the creation of coherent contexts," Dillard says in Living by Fiction: "The work of art may, like a magician's act, pretend to any degree of spontaneity, randomality, of whimsy, so long as the effect of the whole is calculated and unified" (Living by Fiction). In other words, just as in nature "from follows function" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), so too should form follow function in literary art, especially literary art concerning nature. Throughout her writings Dillard strives for a calculated and unified narrative manner that exemplifies the intrinsic artistry of language and of nature, a revealing and concealing manner designed to evoke in her readers a mode of seeing equivalent to her own experience of rapt concentration on the mysterious mute cipher of natural beauty.

Dillard's narrative manner creates a laminal space between verbalizing the seen (revealed surfaces) and seeing beyond what can be verbalized (concealed depths). For Dillard nature abounds with revealed surfaces and concealed depths: "nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Sometimes nature's opaque surfaces become translucent, when an influx of light can give the human perceiver a sense of the depth and continuity of nature. Dillard remarks one of these occasions near the conclusion of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek toward that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky's stars as a pattern of perfect concentric circles." At such a time nature's light intimates some unifying order—the perfect concentric circles of the stars—some underlying continuity or code at the heart (depths) of the mute cipher that is natural beauty. For most of us such moments of "enlightenment" are rare, and Dillard's wish to "stay awake" derives from her aim to "change [her reader's] life." to make her reader—like camera film on which "the moment's light prints"—more sensitive to occasions when nature's opacity transforms into translucence. Although as a part of creation we can never know the whole of which we are a part, during such moments of translucency we receive hints of an overall artistic design informing the mysterious language of natural beauty. These moments of translucency reveal the laminal edge of the particular (the temporal, the opaque surface) where it touches the universal (the eternal, the transparent depth). This laminal edge is most often detected at the margin of natures particulars; the tops of mountains, for example, are "serrated edges … so thin they are translucent" and the breaking waves evince an edge of "live water and light" that is "translucent, laving, roiling with beauty" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

Sometimes Dillard refers to this laminal edge as a hemline between eternity (spirit) and time (matter) in nature, "a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Most often Dillard refers to this edge as a fringe—the fringe of a bird's wing or of a fish's fin, for example. "Spirit and matter are a fringed matrix," Dillard explains; "intricacy means that there is a fluted fringe to the something that exists over against nothing, a fringe that rises and spreads, burgeoning in detail" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). This fringe demarcates where the terror (matter) and beauty (spirit) of life intersect, for "terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

The intersection of this terror and beauty is "God's Tooth" (Holy the Firm), where life is flayed and frayed. "All our intricate fringes, however beautiful, are really the striations of a universal and undeserved flaying" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), Dillard observes, for "the world is actual and fringed, pierced here and there, and through and through, with the toothed conditions of time and the mysterious, coiled spring of death" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek): "we the living are nibbled and nibbling—not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

For Dillard this frayed laminal edge raises as many doubts as it seems to provide affirmative answers about the meaning of life. The terror of the flaying of life seems balanced by the beauty of the fraying of life. Even if Dillard cannot confidently affirm that "the frayed and nibbled fringe of the world is a tallith, a prayer shawl" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), she knows that "beauty is real" within "the intricate fringe of spirit's free incursions into time" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek); that is, given the reality of the intricate beauty of nature's cryptogram, Dillard accepts life's "undeserved flaying" as a mystery within an overall artistic design in nature, within a divine artistry providing—like literary art, in Dillard's opinion—a calculated, coherent, and unified context.

For Dillard all art, literary or natural, conveys this frayed laminal fringe. For her great art is "juncture itself, the socketing of eternity into time and energy into form" (Living by Fiction). Great art conveys "the rim of knowledge" (Living by Fiction), where beauty and terror intersect. In her own art Dillard tries to depict this frayed intersection of matter and spirit, of the temporal and the eternal, of opaque surfaces and translucent depths, of terror and beauty. In her art Dillard relies on a narrative fringe, a laminal edge where the reader glimpses the rim or hemline between time and eternity.

Holy the Firm is an excellent example of this narrative technique. Like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm cues the reader to its author's technique whenever it specifically refers to the "serrate margin of time," to "the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam." Holy the Firm also emphasizes the figure of the artist as someone who encounters the "lunatic fringe" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), someone who sees the intersection of matter and spirit in the world as well as in himself or herself. In Dillard's opinion, the artist spans "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" (Holy the Firm). In Holy the Firm Dillard achieves a narrative fringe suggesting this terrible and beautiful Christlike intersection of time and eternity.

Ostensibly Holy the Firm consists of a journal record of three days, 18-20 November, recording Dillard's thoughts about a seven-year-old girl named Julie Norwich, who on the 19th had her face severely burned and disfigured by an exploding airplane. At first the reader of Holy the Firm might anticipate a narrative governed by a linear, sequential sense of time. The narrative, however, consists of various fragments without evident transitions, a narrative collage, depriving the reader of a comfortable sense of continuity at the level of narrative surface. At one point Dillard suddenly and without transition warns the reader, who has already been having trouble detecting a temporal narrative progression in the book, that "nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time" (Holy the Firm). Referring here to a correspondence between her narrative technique (her narrative fringe) and the laminal edges (the intersections of eternity and time) glimpsed in nature, Dillard suggests that for a sense of continuity in her book one must look not at the surface of temporal details, but into the depths of their eternal significance.

In fact Holy the Firm commences with an impressionistic account of the author awakening to exigent sunlight on the morning of November 18. This event is presented as an experience of a laminal edge in nature, when eternity and time intersect, "when holiness holds forth in time" (Holy the Firm). In lieu of temporal sequential narration as the sun rises there is rapture, and this rapture is epitomized by the waking author's only spoken word, an inarticulate but reverent "Oh" (Holy the Firm). To her awakening senses, especially her sight, the day becomes ever more sharply focused until "the sky clicks securely in place over the mountains, locks around the islands, snaps slap on the bay" (Holy the Firm). This brief experience of translucence at the "serrate margin of time," of an illuminated depth intimating an underlying divinity—"I wake in a god" (Holy the Firm)—in nature, coalesces with the opaque particulars of mountains, islands, and bay clicking securely into place. Then the reader suddenly encounters without transition another narrative beginning, one of a conventional sort: "I live on northern Puget Sound, in Washington State, alone. I have a gold cat, who sleeps on my legs, named Small" (Holy the Firm). However much the reader might prefer this fulfillment of a conventional expectation of a narrative, he or she will not find sufficient continuity at the surface level of Holy the Firm; the absence of this continuity at the linear, temporal narrative level urges the reader to find it elsewhere in Dillard's book. In Holy the Firm continuity is intimated, just as in nature an underlying continuity is intimated. In Dillard's work this underlying continuity is suggested by her narrative fringe—moments when surface details in her account are brought to the edge of visibility, where momentarily they lose their revealed and verbalizable temporal surface opacity (their "thingness," their conventional meaning) and seem—to author and reader—to become translucent; in Holy the Firm, as in nature for Dillard, this translucency suggests a concealed and unverbalizable, eternal depth, where an artlike continuity and design can be faintly detected.

Consider, for instance, the islands Dillard sees from her home on northern Puget Sound. These islands are first mentioned in the opening impressionistic account of morning sunlight, and in this account the islands emerge as if from the dawn of creation: "Islands slip blue from [the god-of-day's] shoulders and glide over the water … [as] the sky clicks securely in place … [and] locks round" them (Holy the Firm). The islands attain increasing temporal reality until they become "unimaginably solid islands" (Holy the Firm). Dillard tries to draw a key to the islands seen from her window and she wishes to discover their names. But the names vary from one source to another, and Dillard eventually realizes the futility of her desire to fix each island temporally with a name, as if a name could designate the essential definition of the chunk of land it apparently identifies.

The trouble is that these islands exist, from Dillard's perspective, "at the world's rim" (Holy the Firm), and occasionally she receives hints that something else, perhaps other islands, exist just beyond her usual range of vision on the horizon. On November 18, for example, "a veil of air" lifts, and Dillard sees "a new island … the deepening of wonder, behind the blue translucence the sailor said was Salt Spring Island," an island newly seen, the name of which she has "no way of learning" (Holy the Firm). "The deepening of wonder": the newly seen island signifies more than another temporal solidity; it becomes a metaphoric index to a pervasive continuum within creation that evokes wonder, a continuum that includes something spiritual beyond the horizon of the phenomenological. On the horizon perceived by our reading mind's eye Dillard's image of islands transubstantiates into a metaphor for spiritual insight, even as on November 18 the actual islands before her eyes give a glimpse of their origins from within the deep continuum of eternity and time. It is a matter of seeing: "I see it! I see it all! Two islands, twelve islands, worlds, gather substance, gather the blue contours of time, and array themselves down distance, mute and hard" (Holy the Firm). As perceived from the window of her room and—since "this room is a skull" (Holy the Firm)—from the window of her eyes, these islands indicate for Dillard that sometimes nature's temporal solid surfaces can momentarily become translucent: when this happens with the islands at the rim of the world, she gets a glimpse of the "serrate margin of time" where eternity and time intersect in a way intimating a continuity of an artlike design or purpose within creation:

And now outside the window, deep on the horizon, a new thing appears, as if we needed a new thing. It is a new land blue beyond islands, hitherto hidden by haze and now revealed, and as dumb as the rest. I check my chart, my amateur penciled sketch of the skyline. Yes, this land is new, this spread blue spark beyond yesterday's new wrinkled line, beyond the blue veil a sailor said was Salt Spring Island. How long can this go on? But let us by all means extend the scope of our charts.

I draw it as I seem to see it. a blue chunk fitted just so beyond islands, a wag of graphite rising just here above another anonymous line, and here meeting the slope of Salt Spring: though whether this be headland I see or heartland, or the distance-blurred bluffs of a hundred bays. I have no way of knowing, or if it be island or main. I call it Thule, O Julialand, Time's Bad News; I name it Terror, the Farthest Limb of the Day, God's Tooth.

                                          [Holy the Firm]

Just as the newly seen island gave Dillard a glimpse of the rim of the world, the "serrate margin of time," God's Tooth, where eternity and time interpenetrate, so too in the above passage does Dillard's prose, her narrative fringe, convey to the reader translucent hints of a transcendental significance to the temporal specificity of the islands she sees in Puget Sound.

When, in the foregoing long quotation, Dillard refers to the newly seen island as a "spread blue spark" she coalesces the image of the island and another image important in her management of narrative in Holy the Firm: the image of fire. Late in the book, in fact, she "sees" the "islands on fire," a "thousand new islands today, uncharted … on fire and dimming" (Holy the Firm). In Dillard's mystical perception all of nature burns, as if, like the burning morning described at the opening of the account, everything in nature ceaselessly emanates from the dawn of creation at the margin of time. In Holy the Firm Dillard develops this image of fire in her remarks concerning the attraction of moths to flames. She describes in detail the fate of a golden female moth, with a two-inch wing span, that flew into the flame of Dillard's candle. Dillard describes in succession the burning of the moth's six legs, two antennae, and various mouth parts—each fact emphasizing the physical reality of the moth. Her final description reads, "And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out" (Holy the Firm). This image of the moth with a head of fire surfaces from time to time in Holy the Firm, but the specificity and opacity of its phenomenological surface reality as described in Dillard's introduction of the image is transformed until the image becomes a translucent emblem signifying the artist.

Dillard subtly prepares the reader for this metamorphosis of the image of the burning moth by noting that at the time of the moth's immolation she was reading James Ramsey Ullman's The Day on Fire, a novel about Rimbaud, who, Dillard says, "burnt out his brains in a thousand poems" (Holy the Firm). Like the moth's head of flame, the artist's "face is flame … lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works" (Holy the Firm). This remark, appearing late in the book, requires the reader to perceive a deeper meaning in the apparently mundane destruction of a moth by a candle flame; it also requires the reader to interpret differently the extraordinary accident that produced Julie Norwich's burned face. Julie, the reader is told at the end of the book, is "like the moth in wax, [her] life a wick, [her] head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in" (Holy the Firm). Julie, who looks somewhat like Dillard, has come to know the experience of the artist, the experience of Rimbaud, with his burnt-out brains, and of Dillard: "I am moth. I am light" (Holy the Firm). By coalescing the images of the moth, Julie, herself, and the artist. Dillard creates a narrative fringe where specific concrete, ordinary particulars of life become translucent signifiers of continuity and design, depths of meaning below phenomenological surfaces.

Dillard's images of "islands on fire," a moth's "head on fire," and a child's face on fire coalesce with her images of seraphs, saints, and nuns in Holy the Firm. The artist's "face is flame like a seraph's" (Holy the Firm), and seraphs "are aflame with love of God"; "they can sing only the first 'Holy' before the intensity of their love ignites them again and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames" (Holy the Firm). In Julie's tragic accident Dillard sees an emblem of the artist's face burning like that of a seraph. Just as the moth with the burning head looks "like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God" (Holy the Firm), so too Julie, "like the moth … [with her] head on fire," becomes a nun in the service of the divinity behind nature: "You might as well be a nun" (Holy the Firm). A "nun lives in the fires of the spirit" (Holy the Firm), Dillard mentions early in the book: and such a nun is like an artist who—like the moth. Julie, and a seraph—has a face of flame, is like Dillard herself: "I'll be the nun for you. I am now" (Holy the Firm).

At first Dillard's image of the nun appears in a literal context. We are told that Julie once dressed Dillard's cat in a "curious habit" so that the cat "looked like a nun" (Holy the Firm). We have no sense yet of how this episode foreshadows what will happen to Julie: nor do we anticipate that the violence of Julie's conversion of the cat into a nun—she rammed the cat into the dress and hit it on its face—adumbrates the violence—the exploding airplane—that will hit Julie's face and convert her, metaphorically, into a nun. Later in the book these specific, opaque, temporal details become translucent when they intimate some "eternal" truth about the artist; then they intimate that some aesthetic continuity informs the design both of nature and of Dillard's work.

That Dillard's artistry reflects the underlying design of nature is also suggested by the imagery of the arch in Holy the Firm. In the impressionistic rendering of sunrise that commences the book we read that "today's god." objectified in the sun, "arches, cupping sky in his belly; he vaults, vaulting and spread, holding all" (Holy the Firm). Even at night Dillard senses this divine arch as she stands "under the ribs of Orion" (Holy the Firm). This macrocosmic arch is microcosmically reflected in every human being, who possesses within him or herself "buttressed vaults of … ribs" (Holy the Firm). Insects, too, exhibit this pattern when, for instance, dead moths become "arcing strips of chitin … like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral domes" (Holy the Firm). Within macrocosmic and microcosmic expressions of nature is manifested an arched place of worship.

The act of worship within vaulted and vaulting nature is itself an act of arching, of arced burning—"lightarches" (Holy the Firm). This image of arching or arcing becomes translucent—suggestive of a deeper significance—when it coalesces with Dillard's fire and nun, or saint, imagery. In Holy the Firm all creation is depicted as immolated in a flaming service arching toward the divinity behind nature: all creation worships—that is, burns—in nature's church: the cathedral-like buttresses that are within each natural form besides being characteristic of nature generally. A moth with a head of fire, a little girl flamefaced, a seraph aflame with love of God—everything burns and arches as it "flutter[s] … in tiny arcs" (Holy the Firm). Even the exploding airplane, which snagged its wing on a tree, like a moth "fluttered in a tiny are" (Holy the Firm). All nature arches, burns, or prays with love, "vaulting … [with] love … and arcing to the realm of spirit bare" (Holy the Firm).

Especially the nunlike artist burns, or prays; like the moth, like Julie, like the seraph, the artist has a head of arcing flame. The artist's work archlike "span[s] the gap, from here to eternity" (Holy the Firm). This mystical worship, or burning, of the artist through the arcing art work, however, remains earthbound; the artist's are strives heavenward "till 'up' ends by curving back" (Holy the firm): "Eternity sockets twice into time[,] and space curves" (Holy the Firm). Even the islands at the rim of creation, at "the fringey edges where … realms mingle," seem to burn, to arch, between two sockets of an eternity intimated by the blank spread of water and the spread of sky. The coalescing of the image of arcing or arching with the images of island, fire, and nuns—artists—occurs in Dillard's narrative fringe, where the temporal opacity of these images seems to become translucent—where pushed to the edge of their conventional meanings they "enlight-eningly" intimate some artlike divine pattern in the depths of creation.

The image of arcing or arching, moreover, informs the narrative structure of Holy the Firm, which comprises three essays that record Dillard's thoughts during three successive days in November. The first day, Wednesday, is a newborn and salted day socketed into eternity. It is a day of intense worship, of prayerful arching, for the artistnun who celebrates how the god of day "sockets into everything that is, and that right holy" (Holy the Firm).

On Thursday, in contrast. Julie Norwich has her face burned by an exploding airplane. Thursday, the date of the second essay of Holy the Firm, is characterized by a downward arc, the reverse of the upward thrust of the preceding day and of the first essay in the book. On this second day Dillard descends into the dark night of the soul, where she contemplates the fact of Julie's terrible suffering. Nervous, rattled, Dillard sits by her window and chews the bones in her wrist. Since she and Julie look somewhat alike. Julie's fate seems to bear implications concerning Dillard's own fate—a bleak prospect as Dillard stares out the window at "no wind, and no hope of heaven … since the meanest of people show more mercy than hounding and terrorist gods" (Holy the Firm). Dillard confronts the "evidence of things seen: one Julie, one sorrow, one sensation bewildering the heart, and enraging the mind, and causing [Dillard] to look at the world stuff appalled. Little wonder that she chews the bones in her wrist as her doubts begin to border on severe skepticism:

Has God a hand in this? Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand at all? Or is he a holy fire burning self-contained for power's sake alone? Then he knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest of us can go hang. Then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind, and alone. The universe is neither contingent upon nor participant in the holy, in being itself, the real, the power play of fire. The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun—but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

                                     [Holy the Firm]

Julie's tragedy and Dillard's dark night of the soul position them both at the Thule-like fringe of life and of its meaning—the fringe where they are torn by God's Tooth.

Friday, the third day, recorded in the third essay of the book, is marked by a slow but certain recovery from the near despair of the preceding day. Having kept awake in order to deal with sobering thoughts through the night and through the dark night of the soul, Dillard drinks boiled coffee as morning begins to arrive. With morning comes her acceptance of the fact "that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. Who are we to demand explanations of God?" (Holy the Firm). Faith arcs within her as she reaffirms that a Christlike "spanning the gap, from here to eternity" is our destiny, especially evident in the burning worship of nun-artists such as Julie and Dillard. Dillard's arcing forth reaffirms the reality of a pattern within "the one glare of holiness": "the world in spectacle perishing ever, and ever renewed" (Holy the Firm). The perishing, or downward are, of Thursday transforms into the renewal, or upward are, of Friday, and the third essay in Holy the Firm appropriately concludes with a celebration of the arrival of morning that recalls the ecstatic celebration of morning at the start of the first essay: "Mornings, when light spreads over the pastures like wings, and fans a secret color into everything, and beats the trees senseless with beauty, so that you can't tell whether the beauty is in the trees—dazzling in cells like yellow sparks or green flashing waters—or on them—a transfiguring silver air charged with the wings' invisible motion; mornings, you won't be able to walk for the power of it: earth's too round" (Holy the Firm).

Just as the earth is round and the diurnal cycle comes round to morning, so moves the tripartite pattern of faith, doubt, and faith renewed. Faith and doubt compose a continuum similar to the juncture of eternity and time. The arcing affirmation of the opening and closing sections of Holy the Firm dramatizes how "eternity sockets twice into time[,] and space curves." The beginning and ending of Holy the Firm are socketed into eternity; they are with faith upward into eternity. The downward curve—doubt—of the middle section of the book is merely the lower half of the mystical circle, or roundness, of creation. The uppermost are of this circle, toward which the opening and closing passage of the book tend, remains veiled in mystery as are the spread sea and sky which surround the are of each island Dillard tries to map. What is important is the fact that "space curves," that the very curve of either the upward are of faith or the downward are of doubt implies circular completion. This implied circular continuum is what nature at once reveals (in the arcs we perceive) and conceals (the completed circuits we cannot see but which we intuit). For Dillard, this circular continuum combining time (the seen) and eternity (the unseen) is the origin of art—"any work of art symbolizes juncture itself, the socketing of eternity into time and energy into form" (Living by Fiction); this circular continuum is also the foundation of hope, for our consideration of the "world as a text … as a work of art … absolutely requires that we posit an author for it" (Living by Fiction).

Where eternity and time are twice socketed in this circular reality is God's Tooth, where "holiness splinter[s] into a vessel" (Holy the Firm), where terror (splintering) and beauty (holiness) interface, where matter (vessel) and energy (holiness) intersect. Julie's story is an instance of "holiness splintered into a vessel" at the frayed fringe of creation. To tell Julie's story and her own story—for she and Julie are somewhat alike as nun-artists—Dillard manages a narrative structure and a narrative technique that convey a sense of this juncture of time and eternity by "expand[ing] the arc of the comprehended world" to "the rim of knowledge where language falters" (Living by Fiction). The narrative structure of Holy the Firm begins with an arc of affirmation, curves downward into doubt, and then with renewed faith arcs upward again. The total, circular configuration of this narrative structure Suggests that the two upward arcs are veiled in mystery but nonetheless apparently meet in a divinity which gives meaning, purpose, and design to all of creation abiding in the lower half of this mystical circle. This narrative structure in Holy the Firm is reinforced by Dillard's technique of narrative fringe: moments when surface details, such as islands, flames, nuns, and arcs, in her account are brought to the edge of visibility at the rim of their conventional meaning, where momentarily they lose their revealed temporal surface opacity (their usual sense) and seem to become translucent—that is, they suggest a concealed "eternal" depth, or significance, where an artlike continuity and design in nature and in Dillard's book can be faintly detected.

Neither the structure of the book, with its seemingly contradictory variations in mood and its nonlinear progression of narrative, nor its style, with its many interfacing images, permits the reader any certain reliance on firmness of detail. The underlying firmness, or significance, of what is narrated in Dillard's book must be sought elsewhere by the reader; it must be sought in the hinted at holy depths beneath the opaque surface details made translucent in Dillard's narrative fringe. In these depths the reader glimpses "holy the firm"—an underlying continuity and design which is at once the revealed and concealed secret of nature and the revealed and concealed art of Dillard's book.