To Annie Dillard’s Astonishment

Human life is privy to a panorama of holiness, the sight and experience of which we’ve grown immaculately skilled at obscuring. As Emerson observed: “Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.”

Richard Linklater takes this a step further in his film, Waking Life. A scene documents a conversation between filmmaker Caveh Zahedi and poet David Jewell, in which they discuss the unnoticed ubiquity of ‘holy moments’. Not only each day, but each moment is a god:

“You know, like this moment, it’s holy. But we walk around like it’s not holy. We walk around like there’s some holy moments and there are all the other moments that are not holy, right, but this moment is holy, right? And if film can let us see that, like frame it so that we see, like, ‘Ah, this moment. Holy.’ And it’s like ‘Holy, holy, holy’, moment by moment. But, like, who can live that way? Who can go, like, ‘Wow, holy’? Because if I were to look at you and just really let you be holy, I don’t know, I would, like, stop talking…I’d be open. And then I’d look in your eyes, and I’d cry, and I’d like feel all this stuff and that’s like not polite. I mean it would make you feel uncomfortable.”

Film is one potential framing mechanism that lets us see the holiness laced through every…