The Atlantic 2016-03

it is not God.”) But Dillard has been named Julie Norwich. Julie is a local chasing that paradox ever since. The girl, 7 years old. Holy the Firm presents via negativa, with its purity and strin- itself as the record of three days on the gency, clearly proved to be the more island. On the second, Julie goes down congenial path. Virginia, where she’d in a plane crash—her father, lying the come for college, did not turn out to craft, is unharmed—and has her face be her landscape. From Tinker Creek, burnt of. beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains in the lushness of the Roanoke Valley, she I doubt that Julie Norwich ever decamped, the year after publishing existed. Her name is an echo of Julian of Pilgrim, for a place considerably more Norwich, the medieval anchoress and austere: Lummi Island, in the northern mystic, whom Dillard had alluded to reaches of Puget Sound. The region, in Pilgrim. Julie’s parents are Jesse and with its wall of mountains to the east Ann, the father of King David (a igure and endless salted ocean to the west, for Christ in Christian typology) and was for her, as she was soon to call it, the mother of the Virgin Mary. Dillard “the edge of the known and compre- also gives us dates for the book’s events hended world … the western rim of the (for example, Friday, November 20) real … the fringey edge … where time that seem deliberately to misalign with and eternity spatter each other with the two years during which the nar- foam”—a place, in other words, where rative might have taken place. But it nature stops and the darkness of divin- doesn’t matter whether Julie is real. Her ity begins. story is a parable, like Job’s. Her story is a riddle, like his. Why do such things The description comes from Holy the happen? For they happen all the time Firm (1977), the work she proceeded to and everywhere around us. In “The write there, a book that is to Pilgrim Deer at Providencia,” an essay pub- what Lummi Island is to Tinker Creek. lished just around the time she moved It throws out the crayish and copper- to Puget Sound (also reproduced in The heads, the frogs, the bugs, the twigs, Abundance), Dillard writes about a trip the scientiic lore, all meanderings of to South America. One day she sees a thought and ambulation. The text runs deer tied up in a village. It’s going to be 65 pages, short ones, and the prose dinner that night. In language layed to seems pressed out drop by drop. Dil- rawness she describes its sufering: lard later said the book took 14 months to write, full-time, which works out Trying to get itself free of the rope, to something like 25 words a day. The the deer had cut its own neck with sentences are bitten rock, bitter water, its hooves … Now three of its feet biting wind: “Nothing is going to hap- were hooked in the rope under its pen in this book. There is only a little jaw. It could not stand … so it could violence here and there in the language, not move to slacken the rope and at the corner where eternity clips time.” ease the pull on its throat … Its hip jerked; its spine shook. Its eyes The final phrase articulates the rolled; its tongue, thick with spit, volume’s central theme. For eternity, pushed in and out. read “God.” For time, read “the world” (i.e., us). For clips, read “kills”—or She might be a god on Olympus, maims, burns, starves, causes anguish looking down impassively on human or grief—that “little violence here and sufering. (She’s also testing us to see there.” Dillard later explained, in An how we react.) Afterward she eats a lav- American Childhood (1987), that she ish lunch, including a venison stew. Her had quit her church, at age 16, over companions, older men, are surprised the problem of sufering, the evident at her detachment. “Gentlemen of the impossibility of reconciling the idea of city,” she apostrophizes them in the es- a loving God with the circumstances say, “what surprises you? That there is that prevail in his creation, the law sufering here, or that I know it?” She of universal pain. This is the prob- has thought about the fact that she (and lem of Job, and like whoever wrote we, and many, many other animals) eat his story, Dillard doesn’t try to offer meat. “These things are not issues,” a solution. She knows that all you can she tells us. “They are mysteries.” really do is frame the question, which she does by telling us about a child Issues are addressed; mysteries are witnessed. The story of Julie Norwich, THE ATLANTIC MARCH 2016 101

NEW FROM BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS in the second part of Holy the Firm, is preigured by another story in the irst. UPDATED AND EXPANDED NEW EDITION (The most celebrated passage in the book, the earlier story is also in the new Praise for the first edition collection.) Dillard is camping. A moth An Economist Best Book of 2015 gets stuck in her candle lame. It burns— Exposes the extraordinary chicanery and then, a hollowed shell, a wick, it keeps dodgy dealing behind staging the Olympics and on burning. “The moth’s head was ire. the World Cup. —the guardian She burned for two hours … like a hol- It’s time for cities to stop the mega-sports low saint, like a lame-faced virgin gone madness. . . . the Olympics and the to God, while I read by her light, kin- World Cup are almost dled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out always boondoggles. his brains in a thousand poems.” The i- Great stuff! nal reference blossoms in the volume’s —richard florida inal third. The virgin Julie, consecrated Meet the 18 families that have She might be a god on produced an astounding 11 presidents, Olympus, looking 4 vice presidents, 33 senators, 18 governors, down impassively on 73 congressmen, and 11 cabinet officers human suffering. America’s Political Dynasties is a great gift by the touch of God, will nonetheless to students of American history. undoubtedly go back into the world, —tom brokaw Dillard thinks. So she herself will be the nun, the anchoress, instead. Which Brookings.edu/press | @BrookingsPress means the poet, the artist: head aire, channeling the Holy Spirit, “lighting These magnetic whiteboard walls give you and your team the kingdom of God for the people to an unlimited blank slate that encourages original ideas see.” Giving her life to illuminate the divine darkness. Bearing witness to and fosters out of the box solutions. the dear. S UCH IS THE VOCATION Dillard expands on in The Writ- ing Life (1989). The book is not a manual of tips. It is a portrait of the artist as a soul, its moral qualities and moral situation, ofered in the second person. “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own aston- ishment.” And: “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.” The book proceeds, like all her finest work, as a series of extended metaphors. The writer is a miner with a pick; the writer is a pilot with a plane; the writer is a rower in a skif, towing a log against the current, heading stoutly always in the same direction. The vol- ume’s dominant motif is the single room: a shed on Cape Cod, a cabin on a Puget beach, an oice, a study, a car- rel (a cockpit, a skif )—the hermit’s cell, the mind alone with itself. “One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.” The work is a collage, like all her in- est books. Dillard has remarked that her objective as a writer of prose has 102 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

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That feeling, it appears, has never shoes.” Except the part where you, you long meditation over her decades of altered. The social novel, the novel know, get to feed your family. reading in the literature of spirit. Its that “aims to fasten down the spirit of hero is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the its time,” she tells us in The Writing Life, D ILLARD IS NOT CONTENT Catholic priest, paleontologist, and “has never seemed to me worth doing.” to affirm her own way. She theologian. Second place goes to the Her own novels, The Living (1992) and needs to denigrate all other Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasid- The Maytrees (2007), each a brilliant ways (unlike Thoreau, who wrote, “I ism. But Teilhard and the Baal Shem, performance, find different ways to would not have any one adopt my mode mystics though they were, had codes eschew the contemporary. The irst is a of living on any account; for … I desire of conduct, codes of service, too, which multigenerational saga, set in the late that there may be as many different came to them from their religions. Dil- 19th century, about the earliest white persons in the world as possible”). The lard seems, at least in this late work, to settlements near Puget Sound, written, social novel isn’t simply not her thing; sense what she is missing. Every once with remarkable idelity and tact, in pe- it’s not worth doing at all. The life in in a while, she pulls a kind of quarter- riod idiom. But it isn’t really about his- nature is good; the life of civilization, back sneak, smuggling morality (“aid- tory, either, in the sense of thinking that the life of cities, as she repeatedly in- ing and serving the alicted and poor,” it matters, or seeing it in terms of some sists (it is a major theme in The May- “a holy and compassionate intention”) kind of development, or tracing its con- trees), is obsessed with stuf and status, into the discussion. The efect is of a nections, if only implicitly, to the pres- the cultivation and display of good man who finishes rebuilding the en- ent. Like all her work, the novel is about taste. The judgment seems, to put it gine of his car and, inding a bolt on the the fact of being alive, for a brief span, mildly, overbroad. It sounds not like all driveway, balances it carefully on the within the overwhelming context of the life in all cities (and Dillard, as far as I hood. The bolt, in Dillard’s case, is the natural world. The Maytrees, her most can tell, hasn’t lived in any cities since entire universe of human attachment. recent book—its prose a prodigy of abandoning her native Pittsburgh after velocity and precision, language con- high school), but like the white-gloved Which brings us to her limitation. centrated to an essence—dissents in milieu that she tells us about in An Dillard is a hedgehog masquerading space instead of time, taking up a hand- as a fox. She seems to know many little ful of Provincetown bohemians, a kind This is a woman who things—those myriad natural phenom- of spiritual elect, who devote themselves has seen angels, who ena that she is so magniicent at seeing to art, simplicity, and contemplation out has seen visions. and describing—but in fact she knows there on the Outer Cape. Dillard’s mind one big thing. She knows that we are is on eternity; she couldn’t give a damn American Childhood. Not to mention born with souls but die in bodies. That about the spirit of her time. that the life of reading and writing is a very big thing. It is the biggest thing. to which she has devoted herself is She is the queen of the hedgehogs. But That, of course, is her prerogative inconceivable without civilization, and it is still only one thing. (though the odor of self-congratulation the cities where it’s principally created. starts to get a little thick in The Maytrees). Crayish don’t write books, and copper- And that, I think, may be the expla- But it points to several problems, and heads don’t buy them. nation for her movement into silence. beyond them, to a fundamental limita- Her works are each unique in formal tion. For she is not content to walk her But the problems go beyond hypoc- terms, but there are only so many times, path in solitude. She also wants to tell risy and spiritual snobbery. Ordinarily, and so many ways, that you can make us how to live. She has an ethic as well the thought that none of us matters in the same points. Already in her last two as a metaphysic, and it consists, in its the larger scheme of things is followed books, the only ones that she has writ- entirety, of worship. “Quit your tents,” by the corrective that, of course, we ten in more than 20 years, it feels as if, she preaches. “Pray without ceasing.” matter a great deal to one another, and thematically at least, she is merely giv- Dillard doesn’t seem to understand it’s need to take care of one another, and ing the old prayer wheel another spin. not that simple, and I think it’s fair to isn’t that what life is after all about? The Abundance, a collage of existing note here not only that her family was The word for this is morality, also material, is, by deinition, nothing new. rich, but that she married, in college, an known as love. But neither has much One hopes it heralds a return. One fears established professional (and published, place in Dillard’s thought. For the Time it is a valedictory. early, a perennial best seller). “It is Being, her last work of noniction, the noble work,” she says in reference to book of seven parts and 10 rubrics, William Deresiewicz is the author of another pilgrim’s spiritual exercises, represents, among other things, a Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of “and beats, from any angle, selling the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. The Atlantic (ISSN 1072-7825), recognized as the same publication under The Atlantic Monthly or Atlantic Monthly (The), is published monthly except for combined issues in January/ February and July/August by The Atlantic Monthly Group, 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037 (202-266-6000). Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., Toronto, Ont., and additional mailing oices. 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Back issues: send $7.50 per copy to The Atlantic, Back Issues, 1900 Industrial Park Dr., Federalsburg, MD 21632 (or call 410-754-8219). Vol. 317, No. 2, March 2016. Copyright © 2016, by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. 106 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC

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THE BIG QUESTION Q: Who is the greatest supporting player of all time? Stacy Schif, author, (She was also a gifted vocalist know the extent of her sup- became the public voice of with her own singing career.) porting role. resistance in South Africa, The Witches: Salem, 1692 and got her hands dirty, only Josh Charles, actor Jonathan Banks, actor to fall prey to the ugliness of God creates her merely to In the span of just six years, Da y Duck: the master of love and war. keep Adam company; he before John Cazale’s life nuance. The reason I like doesn’t burden her with a was cut short at age 42, he him is he didn’t hide the fact Cleto Escobedo III, name. Nor does he speak to co-starred in The Godfather, that he hated being Bugs bandleader, Jimmy her directly, which may have The Godfather: Part II, The Bunny’s supporting player. Kimmel Live! been a mistake. Really, it’s Conversation, Dog Day After- If you’ve ever listened to the all about Eve, who steals noon, and The Deer Hunter. Alison Bechdel, cartoonist, radio, there’s a great chance the show and reroutes his- All were nominated for the Fun Home and Dykes to you’ve heard the Wreck- tory. She leaves us hungering Academy Award for Best Watch Out For ing Crew, the studio band for knowledge and thirst- Picture; three of them won. Technically, Eleanor responsible for some of the ing for transgression. We We never met, yet I miss Roosevelt didn’t so much greatest recordings ever. owe her for art, drama, and him whenever I watch him. support FDR as oppose him Starting in the early 1960s, literature—as well as clothes. on many issues—urging they played behind Frank him to push for integrating Sinatra, the Beach Boys, June Squibb, actress Richard Norton Smith, the armed services, and to Cher, and Paul Simon, just Without Tonto, the Lone prevent the internment of to name a few. Ranger is just a guy in a historian and author Japanese Americans, nei- mask. ther of which he did. But her READER RESPONSES Without Martha Wash- behind-the-scenes progres- Lenny Pickett, bandleader, ington’s love, fortune, sivism had a deeply genera- Scott Locke, Larchmont, N.Y. Saturday Night Live management skills, and tive impact on American Rosalind Franklin, who Anna Magdalena Bach, self-denying patriotism, democracy and the course deciphered the X-rays that the second wife—and a the Father of His Country of the 20th century. allowed Watson and Crick copyist—of Johann Sebas- might have remained a to igure out the structure tian Bach. She transcribed minor member of the Vir- Lynn Nottage, playwright of DNA. much of her husband’s ginia plantocracy. She ran Winnie Madikizela- music, while raising his chil- Mount Vernon during his Mandela, who stridently Cody J. Reeder, dren from his irst marriage long absences; acted as his stood on the front line of the Cincinnati, Ohio and the 13 they had together. wartime secretary, sound- anti-apartheid movement, In modern times, Cardinal ing board, and surrogate; Richelieu’s support (and and charmed members of possible manipulation) Congress who agreed on of Louis XIII in remaking little else. Her discretion Europe is unparalleled. matched her hospitality: Because she burned most of Want to see your name on this page? her and George’s personal E-mail [email protected] correspondence, we’ll never with your response to the question for our May issue: What is the greatest prank of all time? 108 MARCH 2016 THE ATLANTIC Illustrations by GRAHAM ROUMIEU