Over and Over, Mortality Brings Me Home

16 Nov, 2025

Thanks to Simon Critchley’s use of it in Mysticism, I dove this weekend into Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm.

Dillard comes in in part to help Critchley illuminate medieval Christian mysticism’s materiality—the fact that all the visions and the swoons and such were never, and could not be, unconnected from the tangible, created world. Holy the Firm is a very short book, and most of it wrangles with (to put it far too simply) how the divine is mixed up in the concrete. Dillard’s constantly describing what’s around her, what, in being around her, is part of her, and she part of it all. She frequently brings in touch, being in touch, as Critchley notes about her emphatic repetition that an artist’s work has to be “in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home.”¹ It’s not the first time Dillard insists via repetition on connection with the material world and the fact that we need to have it “beat… into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make.” Once we start to forget our created nature and “fancy we control any switches at all…. when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated… then it’s time to break our necks for home.”² It’s a dense passage I’m snipping from, but there seems to be here and throughout the book the sense of a continual back and forth between recognizing, accepting, even celebrating the fact of our existence in the here and material now and a drifting off into abstractions and separation from it all, a repeated process of grounding and going immaterially astray and grounding once again.

I’ve no idea how Søren Kierkegaard would have responded to Dillard’s poetic understanding of time and space and eternity and divinity—nor do I really know what drove me to revisit his Repetition at the same time I was reading Holy the Firm. His narrator Constantius, though, does seem open to the value of her use of repetition to drive a point home. Telling us about a professor giving a talk, Constantius notes that when “a statement in the speech did not meet with approval… he pounded the table and said: I repeat. What he meant at the time was that what he said gained by repetition.”³

Kierkegaard’s own short book isn’t about stylistics, nor is it remotely about the relationship between the material and ethereal, immanence and transcendence. But its focus on the role repetition plays in what I suppose I’d call meaningful living is not unrelated to the ways Dillard knows we must constantly be reminded of who and what we are, and how, with every repeated realization of that identity, a renewal of sorts may ensue.

I don’t have time in this post to be more than sketchy about either writer’s work, and I’m pretty sure my only partial encapsulation of the Dane’s piece in particular will make the professional philosophers sneer. But briefly, narrator Constantius tells us about a nameless young man he’d gotten to know, and who, having fallen head over heels for a girl, quickly realizes he wants out, definitively out. But the wrangling! How to ditch her without destroying her? The young man may be nothing more than a character; he may (more likely) be all too connected to Kierkegaard’s own escape from his beloved Regine (of whom he thought himself unworthy). In either case, the lover never seems to consider the possibility that the poor maiden can handle getting dumped, and that going through all sorts of ruses to make her want to have nothing more to do with him (look, it was her decision all along!) doesn’t say much about their perceptions of the lady’s sense of self-worth and/or ability to find a source of meaning outside of a beau.

Be that as it may, the young man rejects Constantius’s elaborate hoax of setting up a woman on the side, and picks an alternate route of cowardice: he just skips town. Letters from the guy on the lam to Constantius eventually reveal that the girl has found someone else, and now look, everything’s fine! Our boy, after tons of struggle and repeated reading of and identification with the biblical Job—I’m blameless, cruel world that would say otherwise!—now finds himself back where he started before he got his heart into the stupid situation in the first place. Job held in there and got back double what he originally had—well, sort of, our ex-lover admits, since his original family couldn’t be returned to him—and now, after his own struggle, the young man can start afresh. He doesn’t explicitly say he’s doing so as an older and wiser guy, but he’s gained some knowledge, and so like Job, his reset doesn’t begin from exactly the same point as before—but he is secure in himself once again.

So there’s that, but all the while, Constantius has been thinking his own thoughts about how we go through the world; before this flood of letters started coming in, he’d been pondering the possibility that you essentially can’t go back home again—that you can’t repeat a glorious experience you once had, or get the same thrill trying to do so. An attempted recreation of a fantastic time spent years before in Berlin proves his point, and he even gets irritated with the presence of a great armchair in his room. The problem is that his golden recollection of those days of old, and his attempts to recreate them as they were, aren’t letting him go forward and repeat the experience and allow it to add on to what has been and to who he (or anyone) becomes in that going forward. The redo was, he says, “a repetition of the wrong kind.”⁴

It was over twenty years ago when I first read Repetition; in addition to a richer interpretation and just plain greater enjoyment of the text, revisiting what I’d initially encountered in an independent study as as a green and fearful grad student trying to prove myself to a professor who intimidated the hell out of me—well, it led to quite a few personal questions. The only one of those I’ll go into, though, was what any of it, Dillard or Kierkegaard, might say about my own present tendency to pound the table and insist that any of my regular messages of doom gains by repetition. My initial thought is that, like so many authors who stick with a particular theme or topic over a number of works (and you could say that was just as true for Kierkegaard and Christianity, or his young man and his reading and rereading of Job, as it is for Michael Connelly and detective work or Karl Ove Knausgaard and himself), exposure to new information or a new interpretation of your topic means you look at it differently; you go back to it and undertake a repeat engagement—a repetition of the right kind. As a result, you’re not just offering up the same old statement you made before; you’re not recollecting your tried-and-true theory pulled together in the past and carrying it unchanged and inviolable through every new situation or development you encounter.

Even if that repeat engagement doesn’t change your overall feeling about Your Thing, the reconsideration, and the openness it’s entailed, has still been worthwhile. Take Dillard’s insistence on the world’s incarnational nature—its being both undeniably, unavoidably earth-bound and mixed up in eternity—and my deep discomfort with, or rather, hostility to, AI. My disgust with what the latter denies about the value of who we are as fallible, finite humans has long focused on human intellectual and creative and, yes, spiritual capacities: thinking, writing, painting, relating to each other and ourselves. Within it all has been my unspoken acknowledgment that we are creatures of flesh and not merely of information. But the way Dillard keeps coming back to tangibility and touch—“Does something that touched Holy the Firm in touch with the Absolute at base seep into ground water, into grain; are islands rooted in it, and trees? Of course”—makes explicit our enfleshed nature in contrast to intangible streams of digital and digitized data meant to stand in as the source and aim of our deepest desires.⁵ I so often feel defeated about the fact that hordes of movers and shakers are doing their breathless best to achieve the singularity, not just for themselves, but for everyone, whether the masses want it or not—and that most of the rest of the world doesn’t seem to care what they do, as long as they make it cheap and convenient. Something about Dillard’s repeated admonishments, though, shored me up, maybe only because they make the case that whatever happens, however we might be transformed or destroyed, we were born as fleshy carbon-based life forms and will likely remain that way until we breathe out our last bit of CO₂.

In other words, my relief here is in our plain old-fashioned mortality, in recognized limits and limitations that assert themselves in the face of all proclamations that we aren’t and shouldn’t be subjected to any sort of restriction whatsoever. Whether our skin, bones, and brains are connected in the way Dillard believes them to be to the eternal is less important to me at present than her repeated call to remember what we tangibly are. For now, then, I’ll try when I fall into a dark place to pound the table and insist on her message’s gaining meaning and conviction in repetition.

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