Holy the Firm

The second part of Dillard’s narrative introduces Julie Norwich, who soon becomes the focus of many of the book’s themes and guiding questions. Julie, a seven-year-old girl whose face was burned in the aftermath of a plane crash, becomes the human embodiment of the burnt moth, the burnt angel, and of Dillard’s own poetic and spiritual fire. In Julie, Dillard has found the perfect representation for the cold randomness of human suffering, even if she does not arrive at that conclusion herself until the beginning of Part 3.

Dillard uses Julie’s case to focus and engage with many of her earlier concerns about time, the universality of suffering, and Christian theology. Of these ideas, Julie’s example connects most explicitly with the universality of suffering. According to Dillard, the “plane’s engine simply stalled after takeoff” (35), and it was unable to clear the trees. The word choice emphasizes the absurd distance between the “simple” event that caused the plane to crash and the impact it had on people's lives. The phrase also suggests a lack of greater meaning or a causal hand behind the event, as it “simply” happened. This sense of absurdity is redoubled when Dillard relates that Julie’s injuries did not result from the plane’s crash, but from a “glob of flung ignited vapor [that] hit her face” while she was disembarking the plane (43). These absurd events are what Dillard later calls “The joke of the world” (42), which is “less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead” (42). The joke of the world resembles the rake in its symmetry and completeness, “accomplishing all with one right angle” (42).

In Part 1, Dillard uses the moth, the tiny god, Rimbaud, and her own room to make a series of connections between fire, divinity, and creativity. In every case, these ideas converge in the image of a burning head. Julie, then, is co-opted as the continuation and encapsulation of these ideas. Though absurd events led to her condition, the resulting unification of Dillard’s theological theories illustrates how the universe “accomplish[es] all with one right angle” (42). Right angles are particularly notable in this context, as they disrupt linear thought or logic and preclude the possibility of heading in the same direction. Julie’s intrusion into Dillard’s narrative serves a similar purpose, changing the narrative direction. This is perhaps most evident in Dillard’s mention of the “crack in the world where the plane fell” (49), which implies that the crash not only upset the natural world but that it created a split—an “edge” that reveals spiritual truths. As Dillard states, it is by “freak chance [that] the skin of illusion ever split[s] and reveal[s] to us the real” (48). This imagery of rending and splitting evokes the biblical account of the veil at the Temple of Jerusalem tearing at Jesus’s death. Since this veil had symbolized humanity’s estrangement from God, Dillard’s allusion relates to her depiction of suffering as a holy process through which we access the “real”—that is, God.

In keeping with this idea of suffering breaking through our illusions and orienting us to deeper truths, Dillard at times presents Julie as a spiritual conduit. Even before the crash, Dillard depicts her trying to stuff Small into “a black dress long and full as a nun’s” (40): If Dillard feels compelled to worship God, Julie compels creatures to worship, however ineffectively. Julie is also connected to the tiny god that “whistl[es] at [Dillard’s] ear” in Part 1 (29). Prior to her accident, Julie attempts to whistle, but ultimately resorts to “squeak[ing] a little falsetto note through an imitation whistle hole in her lips” (39). She is also described as appearing “next to the porch under the hawthorn tree” (38), and a porch is where Small finds the tiny god. Additionally, hawthorn trees in the Celtic traditions are signs of places where worlds overlap. Julie elsewhere appears as an inexperienced, innocent manifestation of Dillard’s own childhood. Despite only seeing one another once, Dillard and Julie recognize the similarities between one another almost instantly.

In addition to introducing Julie as a quasi-spiritual figure, Part 2 also reengages with many of the more abstract notions that Dillard grapples with in the first part. Faced with the absurdity of Julie’s accident, Dillard concludes that “No gods have the power to save” and that “The one great god abandoned us to days, to time’s tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his rudeness and idiocy” (43). Here Dillard makes her distinction between the daily gods and the “one great god” explicit, but she does not yet connect the “one great god” with the Christian God, to whom she refers using a capitalized g (45). The gods themselves she presents as powerless against time. The god of the day she met Julie, for instance, is “a husbandman […] sleeping in time, an innocent old man scratching his head” (43). Dillard’s willingness to indulge illusions butts up against Julie’s manifest suffering. Though “the illusions are almost perfect,” Dillard concedes that “the pain is also, and undeniably, real” (44).

Dillard refines these ideas later in Part 2. “This one God,” she states, “is a brute and a traitor, abandoning us to time” (46). She bases her claim on “evidence of things seen: one Julie, one sorrow, one sensation bewildering the heart” (46), and so on. While not all of Dillard’s evidence is empirical, she nevertheless uses it as one would use empirical evidence to support her argument. However, she then turns away from empiricism and towards faith. As if discovering the argument as she writes it, she states that “Faith would be that God is self-limited […] that he bound himself to time and its hazards” (47). She then refines that definition of faith further and argues that it would be “that God has any willful connection with time” (47).

Dillard allows that if God is incapable of interacting with time—that is, if he is bound by it—then he would be unable to intervene as we expected him to, despite his benevolence. Instead of being wronged by a benevolent God who chooses not to act, Dillard sees humans as “victims” and “captives” of an indifferent, illusory universe (48). Despite these concessions, however, Dillard finds herself unable to conceive of an existence that a greater being has not ordered in some way. The world to her still “all looks staged” (49), or “created” in a way similar to the creatures she mentions earlier. Similarly, Dillard names the new island “God’s Tooth” (51), suggesting that God is capable of physically interacting with the world, however strangely. This tension between the universe’s apparent indifference and its apparent order is as far as Dillard gets on her second day.