For the Time Being

by Annie Dillard, Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

From Annie Dillard, one of the most compelling writers of our time, comes her most profound narrative yet. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard renews our ability to discover wonder in lifes smallestand darkestcorners.Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Dillard searches for answers in a powerful array of images: pictures of bird-headed dwarfs in the standard reference of human birth defects; ten thousand terra-cotta figures fashioned for a Chinese emperor in place of the human court that might have followed him into death; the paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin crossing the Gobi Desert. Vivid, eloquent, and haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Spirituality, Nature, Religion, Memoir

Audiobook

First published March 1, 1999

About the author

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[JES · Rating 5 out of 5]

About 20 years ago, I met a guy -- a writer whose opinions I respected, even admired -- whose response to Annie Dillard's writing took me completely by surprise. He hated it. As I recall, he used words like "pretentious," "overrated," and "pretty" (that last may have had quotation marks of its own around it).

Given that I was in mid-swoon at the time from my first exposure to her work, I couldn't really muster a defense other than of the to-each-his-own sort. Since that time, though, as a non-confrontational sort myself, I've tried carefully not to flat-out assume that everyone would be swooning along with me. I could see, kind of, what he was getting at (without buying into his reading at all). Consider a passage like the following, from early in For the Time Being:

An infant is a pucker of the earth's thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeasts and break off; we forget our beginnings. A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I have finished swelling; our circling periods are playing out, but we can still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do not know.

There must be at least a thousand more straightforward, less oblique ways to say what this says, and many other writers on the same topics have gone that route. Indeed, a common first response to such a cluster of sentences, even among Dillard's fans, is to think: Huh? Whazzat?

But wait. If you are are brought up short in this way, but remain patient and curious, you can circle back (yes, circle) to the first words, and go through them again, and again if you need to. Each return trip reveals new layers and shadings not obvious from the words' ostensible "meanings." If I do this often enough -- I can't speak for you -- I find that I have to do it less often as I go through the rest of the book. It's like I enter some sort of a trance state, in which the shapes of the sense become intuitively easier to make out. And the vividness of the language, of the cadences, of the metaphor, yet make it stick in my mind much longer than would a straight-ahead series of declaratives.

(You may know of a phenomenon familiar to astronomers and others who spend a lot of time in the dark: while the most obvious way of seeing something in the night sky, for example, is to look directly at it, only when you're attentive to what's going on peripherally do you see some things at all.)

Still, I was right in that earlier defense: not everyone will (or should) "get" her in this way. It's a bother, after all: we're all busy, so-many-books-so-little-time, and so on. But I myself find that her writing rewards patience.

Dillard's overall topics this time around, expressed directly in the title, felt darker and deeper than usual, maybe as a consequence of age (hers, and/or mine): time, yes, and also being. What does it mean to "be" human, especially? What does it mean to say that God "is"? What sort of creature "is" God, anyway, especially vis-a-vis human beings? Along the way (as you can see from the other reviews here on Goodreads), she looks at deserts -- literally sand -- and paleontology; the life and work of Teilhard de Chardin; the life (and paranoias) of a Chinese emperor of antiquity; the vast numbers of people there are, or ever were; genetic anomalies; understanding evil and (less obviously) goodness; the ideas and the lives of rabbis and other students of the Kabbalah; a host of small digressions -- divagations -- and (yes) circlings-back.

One of my favorite side-trips had to do with the Solutreans, a, well, a tribe? a culture? of humans who thrived some eighteen thousand years ago, in France. (They thrived for all of three thousand years.) They invented the bow and arrow and the needle, and they also made long thin yellow knives of quartz-like materials, knives which are among the sharpest things anyone has ever made. With "a cutting edge only a few atoms thick," these knives were made "wittingly, too fragile to use."

What does such a knife have to do with a human being, i.e., with being-human? Dillard:

The maker knew he was likely to lose many hours' breath-holding work at a tap. The maker worked in extreme cold. He knew no one would ever use the virtuoso blades. He protected them, and his descendants saved them intact, for their perfection. To any human on earth, the sight of one of them means: someone thought of making, and made, this difficult, impossible, beautiful thing.

Of course, Dillard in that passage refers to physical artifacts of prehistoric peoples. It strikes me now, as I write this review, that Dillard's own body of work operates in the same dimension, at the same level, as those ridiculously thin blades. Why in the world would you ever want to pick up and handle something so, well, precious, pointless, and fragile -- yet with so much potential for drawing blood? Because only by doing so do you get to hold it up to the sky's light, and see the transition from its "dully, waxy gold" center to the translucent and finally transparent edge. There, "At its very edge," she says, "the blade dissolves into the universe at large." Yeah. I think that's about right.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book slightly less than Dillard's other books because she uses other people's words more than her own. For some people, that might make this book stronger, but I miss her being the strongest presence. This combines a French philosopher/Jesuit priest who would turn out to be one of the most important paleontologists of the 20th century, Hasidic Judaism, scientific information on sand, and a personal journey through the middle east. But it isn't about those things - the book is really pondering birth, death, existence, value.

"We who breathe air now will join the already dead layers of us who breathed air once. We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us."

"There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time - or even knew selflessness or courage or literature - but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less."

"You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials."

"We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we're a lousy snowflake. Okay, we're a tree. These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave."

"Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears."

This book made me want to read the letters of Teilard and Lucile Swan.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Affirmation that Dillard's words are crafted so spectacularly that I had to pause the audio, and listen again and again. Her mix of science and spirit are so fully engaging - here she threads stories of mystical Judaism (early rabbinic merkabah with later kabbalah, and Lubavitcher Hasidism) alongside reflections of newborn babies with severe deformities; the science and life cycle of a particle of sand, mating snails, and the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit priest/paleontologist who discovered Peking Man [homo erectus] in the early 1900s.

I particularly liked this section on dancing, relating this story of the Ba'al Shem Tov :

The Ba'al Shem Tov danced and leaped as he prayed, and his congregation danced too. Hasids today dance and leap. Dancing is no mere expression, it is an achievement. Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav noted that if the dancer could persuade a melancholy person to join them, his sadness would lift, and if you are that melancholy person, he taught, persuade yourself to dance, for it is an achievement to struggle and bring that sadness into the dance.... By means of dance, one can nullify the evil forces.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annie Dillard is the best writer on the planet. Period.

"The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their lose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth."

"Standing again, rubbing my fingers together, I found more stone stairways, more levels, and the street, the sunlight, the world. I found a van in the parking lot of what used to be, I try to tell myself, a stable--but this story was worn out for now, the paradox and scandal of any incarnation's occurring in a stable. More powerful at the moment was the sight of people converging from all over the world, people of every color in every costume, to rub their fingers across a flat hole in a bossy silver star on the cracked marble floor of a cave."

[Stephanie Barko · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the March 2021 selection of South Austin Spiritual Book Group.

This was a tough read to endure, but about three-quarters the way through I began to latch onto a few ideas and names that made it slightly easier to hang on. The book acts like an abstract painting in that it throws down big ideas and tiny details to see which of them will stick.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still can’t explain this book. I thought I was closer, but this found poem appeared instead.

We can still leave footprints in a trail whose end
we do not know. The solitudes move us. Souls can aid
one another. Buddhism notes that it is always
a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Does anyone believe the galaxies exist
to add splendor to the night sky over Bethlehem?

“The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world,”
he wrote, “are only an illusion.”
“Throughout my whole life,” he noted later,
“during every minute of it,
the world has been gradually lighting up
and blazing before my eyes
until it has come to surround me,
entirely lit up from within.”

The blue light of television flickers
on the cave wall. If the fellow crawls out
of the cave, what does he see? Not the sun
itself, but night, and the two thousand
visible stars. There was a blue baby-shaped bunch of cells
between the two hands of Dr. C. Lamont
MacMillan, and then there was a person who
had a name and a birthday, like the rest of us.
Genetically she bore precisely one
of the 8.4 million possible
mixes of her mother’s and father’s genes,
like the rest of us. On December 1, 1931,
Anna MacRae came to life.

Once, I tried to converse with him, the fellow
who crawled out of his blue-lit cave to the
real world. He had looked into this matter
of God. He had to shout to make himself heard: “How
do you stand the wind out here?” I don’t. Not
for long. I drive a schoolkids’ car pool. I shouted
back, “I don’t! I read Consumer Reports every
month!” It seemed unlikely that he heard. The wind
blew into his face. He turned and faced the lee.
I do not know how long he stayed out. A
little at a time does for me—a little every day.
She came to life. How many centuries
would you have to live before this, and
thousands of incidents like it every
day, ceased to astound you?

“The more I work, the more I see things differently,
that is, everything gains in grandeur every
day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more
beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
There are about a billion more people
living now than there are years since our sun
condensed from interstellar gas. Among major
religions only Buddhism and Taoism
unblinkingly encompass the universe—
the universe “granulated,”
astronomers say, into galaxies

It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic
people knew God personally once upon a time—or even
knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that
it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available
to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy
age than ours, and never a less. On the dry Laetoli plain
of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid
footprints. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record
of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago—
More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also
preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three
who walked: it was a rainy day. They understand that grand coincidence
brings us together, upright and within earshot, in this flickering
generation of human life on this durable planet.

Sometimes en route,
dazzlingly or dimly,
he shows an edge of himself
to souls who seek him,
and the people who bear those souls,
marveling, know it, and see the skies
carousing around them,
and watch cells stream
and multiply in green leaves.
We live in all we seek.
The hidden shows up in too-plain
sight. It lives captive on the face
of the obvious—the people,
events, and things of the day—
to which we as sophisticated
children have long since
become oblivious.
What a hideout:
Holiness lies spread and borne
over the surface of time and stuff like color.

When one of his Hasids complained of God’s hiddenness, Rabbi Pinhas said,
“It ceases to be a hiding, if you know it is hiding.”
But it does not cease to hide, not ever, not under any circumstance, for anyone.
Teilhard’s own vitality still battened on apparent paradox.
The man who said that his thirty months on the front in the war had made him
“very mystical and very realistic” now wrote from his blue tent in Mongolia that
“rain, storms and dust and icy winds have only whipped up my blood and brought me rest.”
We who were awake were a multitude trampling the continents
for our day in the light—feeling our lives and stirring about,
building a better world a jot, or not—and soon the continents
would roll us under, and new sets of people would trample us.
I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir. You have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? Your maul and your wedge?
Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky—crack it at one blow, split it at the next—
and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful,
WHAT’S with the bird-headed dwarfs?

We are civilized generation number 500 or so,
counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We
are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from
150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose.
And we are human generation number 125,000,
counting from the earliest Homo species.
Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness,
he frees their souls…. He who prays and sings in holiness,
eats and speaks in holiness, in holiness performs
the appointed ablutions, and in holiness
reflects upon his business, through him the sparks which have fallen
will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed.”
“It is given to men to lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned.
Not merely to wait, not merely to look on!
Man is able to work for the redemption of the world.”
The work is not yours to finish, Rabbi Tarfon said,
but neither are you free to take no part in it.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've moved so much that I've given almost all books away. This is one I've saved. I've lost it twice, replaced it twice. I can't remember the last time I opened it, yet I would feel lost without it. Once, this was my cure for anxiety. Overcome, I would open it at random and read until I felt better. On the one hand, it affirms the uniqueness and wonder of all things. On the other, it reminds us of how insignificant we are in our universe of mind-boggling numbers. Both of these themes are developed in a roundabout way, through roughly a dozen subjects that Dillard repeatedly returns to--birth, China, clouds, thinker, and so on--examining them from different angles in her recognizably offbeat and unsettling way. Some parts drag, and many people would detest the book as a whole. The first time I picked it up, I dropped it after a few pages. But something made me open it again, and I was glad I did. One of the most intriguing, thought-provoking, and beautifully written books I've read by one of our most eccentric living authors.

[Richard Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this audacious little book Annie Dillard ponders God, the holiness of newborns, and any individual’s insignificance in geologic time. Her prose is astringent, with wry appreciation for the brilliant and for the genuine among us; with a barely controlled horror at our animal fates and our capacity for indifference and evil. She unfolds this meditation in discrete chunks; each of the book’s seven chapters is divided into segments, more or less these and in this order:

• Birth (especially horrific birth defects and the brief otherworldly calm of newborns);

• Sand (its formation and ubiquity);

• China (the ancient, buried humans and civilizations, and the 1920s work there of the French theologian-paleontologist Tielhard de Chardin);

• Clouds (randomly documented ones);

• Numbers (people, especially—so many and yet so compactible);

• Israel;

• Encounters (hers, with random people, in airports, deserts, the Sea of Galilee);

• Thinkers (wise men considered in turn, mostly rabbis);

• Evil (including the torture of thinkers and genocide);

• and Now (the humdrum pathology of our time).

What’s impressive is to see these subjects come together. Sand, for instance: The earth’s rivers make it by breaking up rocks; the rivers spew it into the sea, which throws it back and makes beaches. The ocean creates no sand, just refines it. Neat—but? Well, who hasn’t wondered why ancient civilizations are so far down? Because of sand and loess: We are being patiently buried. The Earth steadily takes us back. The finest grit and carbon swirl everywhere and come to rest. Sand is further broken by windblast and water, moves, and settles. Every thirty years there’s a new inch of topsoil. 3,000 years is nothing.

“Why is there sand in deserts? Because windblown sand collects in every low place, and deserts are low, like beaches,” Dillard writes.

She wants us to ponder such accretion.

We are as ephemeral as clouds, individually, of course, but so are our generations in the reach of time and so too our civilizations pass away. How old is America, again? Apparently we can know some things intellectually but not emotionally. Dillard finds herself reading the news more faithfully as she ages, getting her daily fix of the delusion that we and our time are unique in human history.

“No, we are not and it is not,” she answers. “These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation—now there’s a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.”

We the living, meanwhile, continue to encounter each other: “Possibly when our brains fire their dying charges we will remember and see, to our dismay, not any best-loved face but instead some solitary figure, a stranger, whose image the mind retains.” Maybe, in her case, the punch-drunk ex-boxer who, working as a skycap, impersonated Elvis for her at an American airport’s curb. Or one of her other smoking buddies she shows huddled around the world’s museums, shops, and cultural hubs.

Her prose is distilled, the reside of rigor. In the holy land she spies birds mate in the air and snails, for hours, in wet litter. A Palestinian boy pees his name in the sand behind a camel. She writes, “Under the camel a runnel moved over the dust like an adder.” In China she watches in the distance a man pulling a plow he’s harnessed to his body: “His feet trod his figure’s blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call.”

Grounding her juxtapositions in the jaw-droppers we’re normally immune to—over eight million gene combinations occur in the creation of each of us; it takes a river one million years to move a grain of sand one hundred miles; there are nine galaxies for each person alive on earth, and each galaxy contains one hundred billion suns—in stories and in our own cast-off insights from age twelve onward, Dillard earns her flights and even her despair. Reared a Pittsburgh Scotch-Irish Presbyterian girl, she converted to Catholicism, taking refuge in the yeasty anonymity of the corporeal mass, then absorbed the Jewish mysticism explored here and finally called herself a “Hasidic Christian.”

In this book she wonders just what kind of God we’re dealing with anyway. The notion of an all-knowing deity that presides over our suffering causes good people “to quit God altogether at this point,” she says but adds, in an oblique rebuke, that evidently “they last looked into God in their childhoods.” It is each adult’s task, obviously, to define for himself the God he believes in (or doesn’t). Dillard’s doesn’t have his eye on every sparrow:

"Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, “All your actions show your wisdom and love.” Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, “That’s a lie!”—just to put things on a solid footing."

Onward we go, and Dillard notes the paradoxical view of people of every age that heroism and holiness are far in the past while their time alone is—nevertheless—uniquely historic and significant. Both are erroneous prideful notions, as spiritual thinkers have pointed out, and they’re elegantly dunked by Dillard: “In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”

But who is wise? Dillard: “Confucius wept. Confucius, when he understood that he would soon die, wept.” Maybe he just loved the world and hated to leave it. But her sentence implies something less. Common surprise, perhaps.

We’re just here, for the time being. We’ve forgotten, Dillard notes, our ancient ancestors’ stone knives that can skin a bear or open an abdomen with more ease than any of today’s shiny instruments. But we’re playing with new gizmos. Our thin lightweight laptop computers are only getting better. And we don’t mourn people we can’t imagine, whether they died yesterday in India or 10,000 years ago beneath our feet.

[Maureen Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annie Dillard takes on the biggest questions of our existence. Why do we exist? How can one person matter? Dillard approaches these questions, not so much to fnd the answer as to explore what it means to exist and matter. Whether she is exploring the genetic slip-ups of human malformations or Teilhard's palentological explorations in China she is herself delving into the meaning of being a human being in a particular place and time, experiencing the history of that particular time and place. At one point she asks the question,"at what number do other individuals blur for me?" Is one death more tragic than 1 million only because we cannot imagine the number 1 million?

This book reads like poetry, the braided stories of disfigured children, Teilhard's grappling with science and religion,and clouds return and return, always enlarging the questions and the scope of the exploration. Perhaps Dillard's most insightful moment is her declaration, "you can live as a particle crashing abaout and colliding in a welter of material with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of material without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of solliding materis."

This book will give you a lot to think about for a long, long time.

[Paul, · Rating 2 out of 5]

Annie Dillard is another in a long, long, long line of writers that examine what death and suffering mean, particularly its implications for the existence and characteristics of God. I enjoyed Dillard's style of writing, and I thought some of her metaphors were telling. Overall, I thought this book was interesting, but I am deeply disturbed that reviewers are calling this book "mind-expanding". Annie Dillard takes the fundamental problem of human existence and "discovers" it. She tries to personalize it, which is good. But it is NOT new in any sense. The discovery that everybody dies and bad things happen to people is .... gasp ... not a modern one. That this may have some implications for the monotheistic, omnipotent God of the Jews, Muslims, and Christians is .... ... not new. The book of Job is reckoned by many scholars to be the first book written in the Old Testament, more than 3500 years ago. Its subject? Good God and bad things. Wow. Imagine that. Ancient people aren't stupid, they're just ancient.

Unfortunately, the depth of Annie Dillard's interaction with this rich, millenia-long discussion is to make various cutting remarks to the extent of "Well, that's dumb and it doesn't work." Instead, she travels to the borders of monotheistic thought: the Gnostics, the Kabbalists, etc. and finds, another surprise, the common religious beliefs of modern man as elaborated in every New Age system of belief .... all men are part of God, God is part of us, we do His work on earth, etc. To paraphrase Albert Schweitzer, she has looked at the history of religion and found reflected there her own image. In other words, I could have read Paulo Coelho or Eckhart Tolle and gotten the same ideas. Add to that some truly idiotic statements about Christians - for example, "The majority of Christian intellectuals are pan-entheists." and what you have is a collection of cool stories, nice historical figures that show one woman's choices about what she wants to believe from among the world's streams of religion, but doing it with an overtone of arrogance towards other seekers that I find disturbing.

So, I'm grateful that Annie Dillard attempted to put things in perspective. I think that is one of the never-ending tasks of humanity to be cognizant of the true scale of reality and our small place in it. But, I don't really like reading books by authors who think they are better and smarter than their readers ... even if they are.

[GoldGato · Rating 4 out of 5]

The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news.

Such 'true dat' reflections from Anne Dillard endeared me to this book. Filled with short paragraphs on birth, death, God, good, and evil, I became somewhat addicted to each page. If we could break our book collections into wine comparisons, this volume would land in the Chianti section...medium-bodied with high acidity.

This is where they wash the newborns like dishes.

Lest one think Dillard just rambles on like a Zeppelin song, she actually connects everything together (ordinary beads on a never-ending string) via the life story of Pierre Teilard de Chardin. Philosopher, Priest, Geologist, Wanderer. Being a Jesuit, he believed that one could find God in all things. Even in the Gobi Desert.

The spark of goodness within things, the Gnostic-like spark that even the most evil tendency encloses, lends evil its being.

This is a book which is not easily categorized. In fact, I checked the local library to see where it was placed, and it was within the Essays section. However, the library copy seemed unsure of itself on that shelf. It could just as easily fit in other areas. I gave it a good pep talk to make sure it understood it was different and, therefore, more valuable.

Then I went home and drank a glass of Chianti and water.

Book Season = Spring (good must exist when gardens bloom)

[Kendall]

Annie Dillard may be my number one. She is maybe the only religious/spiritual/Christian writer I would always read-- mainly because her predominant theological inquiry seems to be asking God "what the fuck??" This particular book was not my favorite of hers, I think I prefer her shorter essays/short stories, although it did contain some very memorable lines that are classic Annie Dillard bangers: "Quick: Why aren't you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place but to forestall burial."
I think what is so excellent about her writing is these juxtapositions between very lofty, spiritual wonderings with conversational, almost idiomatic expressions-- her hardhitting spiritual questions are seemingly instantly deflated by the casualness but really are made all the more relatable and heartbreaking somehow.
I love any writing that tackles the seemingly unprecedented terrible-ness of now and gently reminds us that every generation thinks they are at an apocalypse of humanity, faith, etc. "Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?-- No, we are not and it is not... There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather?"

[A.C. Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently blogged, I have a crush on Annie Dillard. Everything I've read by her has been astounding, eye opening, inspiring. Her thoughts and experiences on life, spirituality, nature, and God, in this unusual collection of essays argues both our insignificance in a grand, unknowable universe and our roles as gods in our own lives and the lives those we encounter. Droll and quirky commentary on her travels to Israel and China follow countless quotes from preeminent Kabbalist rabbis, palentologists, and various spiritual thinkers and searchers, 300 B.C.E until the very recent present. This collection is a thought intensive read with many rest stops allowing the reader to consider these age-old, important questions about life.

[Josiah Stephens · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully written book, constructed painstakingly by a woman who wants holiness, but not God, and gets neither.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well... juicy bits here and there, but the choppy narrative is challenging. But challenging is good! OK, then, at times it's more than challenging; it stretches credulity and feels contrived or precious or, worse, like paint splattered on a canvas. "Find meaning, or call my bluff!" the artist taunts. "Fuck off, this is shit, this isn't honest!" I yell back.

That said, there are good bits, lovely bits. Much of the natural description, and the spiritual meditations, and most of the historical quotations and mini-biographies - the Annie Dillard adventure - is most wonderful. It's just the silly meditations on numbers, and the random paragraphs intermixed with the five major themes, which rankle.

Enough. Some good bits I don't want to forget:

+ The loess, that "strange golden soil" - the deepest in the world, up to four hundred feet deep, the Han center from which Imperial China began with the Qin Dynasty (p 46). Cf the dark soil of the Mississippi Delta, created as a glacier moved over the continent, laid in wait for the cotton explosion. Meanwhile China's taxes were being levied on this rich productive soil for 23 uninterrupted centuries!

+ Bits of life and theology from Teilhard de Chardin, French paleontologist, explorer, lively character

+ Tales from the Hasidim, especially of their joy and dancing.

+ Tales of rabbis: Luria, Akiva, the Baal Shem Tov, the Vilna Gaon, y mas.

+ Two horrifically detailed descriptions of flayings: of Rabbi Akiva for teaching Torah by the Romans (135 CE; p. 26); and later of Hyptia (5th century CE; Christians scoop her live flesh with oyster shells, and fling it "quivering" into a fire. The crimes were study of philosophy and mathemtics. See Gibbon's and Bertrand Russell's comments on this episode; p. 139.)

+ A great description of the partially unearthed clay army of 5,000 of Emperor Qin, twenty feet underground, frozen there in time. A great observation that what's most stunning is seeing it there, buried, half-unearthed; getting a sense from that of how we really and truly, literally, live on top of our ancestors, on top of earlier civilizations, etc. How it won't be half as remarkable later, in a musuem.

+ A Mongolian family, early 20th c, teaches toddlers to ride horses by mounting them on SHEEP!!!!! (p 12)

+ Another quote from Giacometti (p 43)

[Werner]

This is a book I started reading some years ago, because at the time I was looking for a short read, and I had enjoyed Dillard's earlier books Holy the Firm and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. However, the subject matter, style and general feel of this book are totally different from those of the other two; the case is a good illustration of the fact that liking some of an author's work is no iron-clad guarantee that one will like all of it! For me personally, this one just failed to engage my interest, so I abandoned it as not a good fit for my particular reading tastes. (That's not a criticism of the quality of the thought or the writing as such.)

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a rare book for me - one that made me stop, savor what I had read, and occasionally go back and reread for clarity. Life, death, God, evil, suffering, bird headed dwarves - Annie Dillard delves into them all and weaves her introspection into a something beautiful. I was left seriously pondering my own existence, my place in the world and what more I should be doing to be actively living. So, so many things I loved about this book, but have been particularly fixated on the idea of dirt, sand, etc. and how all of us are heading there, how it is all around us, how we start dying the day we are born. Rather than alarming, I find the idea quite comforting.

[Elizabeth]

i love annie dillard but this one troubles me. a substantial part of this book is about israel, and while she writes kindly of individual palestinians (almost exclusively christian ones), she neglects to mention anything about the state-sanctioned oppression of palestinians by israel, the violent displacement, the apartheid. in a time of such atrocity, it is perhaps not fair for me to apply today’s moral logic to the annie dillard of 1999. but given her evident concern with mass death and suffering, it is difficult for me not to feel like she should have known better. even in the 1990s israeli apartheid was in full swing.

and as a deeply agnostic person i had trouble connecting with the more spiritual aspects of this book; she appears to pose as an agnostic while clearly being a believer of some sort (“surely it must add up,” she says of prayer).

she has many interesting things to say here, and i see myself rereading many parts of this. i really enjoyed her discussion of soils and sands, which was completely unexpected and delightful. and her writing about early humans was very fascinating and meaningful to me. but sometimes her tone oscillated in a way that was off-putting, describing really intense horrors and then using casual language like “pushing up daisies.” some of the ways she wrote about mao and chinese peasants felt a little weird to me, as was her description of birth defects, as was her description of helping a wheelchair-bound stranger use the restroom… just a lot of material that didn’t seem necessary or appropriate

anyways, i came to this book at a moment of existential despair, hoping it would help me feel better about life & death. and it sort of did, so i must give credit where it is due

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond me.

"They found that Bride Sabbath, whose light sanctifies the week, was akin to the Shekinah, that weeping and wandering woman who figures as God's presence in the world, exiled here in suffering until redemption brings the world to God."

"When the liturgy ended, most men removed their prayer shawls and phylacteries, and left; a few lingered to study. Later, if the boy saw a book left open on a bench, he spread a prayer shawl to cover its open pages. In his world, people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person."

"The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw the baby out with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy."

"Scratching under a suburb of St. Louis, archaeologists recently found thirteen settlements, one on top of the other, some of which lasted longer than St. Louis has. Excavating the Combe Grenal cave in France, paleontologist found sixty different layers of human occupation."

"At what number do other individuals blur for me?"

"Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears."

[Nick Burdick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking. Dillard is like no other writer I know. In For The Time Being, she struggles—mightily, and to our benefit—with the question “what’s the point of it all?” Her cast includes a paleontologist, a deceased Chinese emperor, a neonatal nurse, a Kabbalist rabbi, and occasionally, you. Each of these characters sheds a different light on what it means to be alive, to encounter one another, to seek purpose as an individual drop in a great ocean. The answers (which is too tidy a word) are scenes filled with unexpected juxtapositions, by turns heart-wrenching, sublime, jarring, disturbing, and frisson-inducing. A word of warning: do not expect Dillard to deliver neatly arranged thoughts to be chewed and digested like hors d’ouvres. Expect 600-lb gorillas, and plan to wrestle. That’s not to say that her writing is opaque—far from it. But you will pause after scenes and interjections and ask yourself “Why did she put that there? What did that have to do with the scene before it?” The effort you expend to unearth these unexpected cross-pollinations is exactly what makes her work so gratifying.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The miracle of this book is how Dillard gets at the universally important truths (nothing less than what is the fundamental in our lives) through such specific and gripping stories, examples, and juxtapositions of information. She doesn't tell us the truths, she shows them to us, reveals them in sometimes horrifying ways. Without a single illustration it is as visually detailed as a I've read in a long time. This book was recommended to me by an artist friend. I'm savoring every page, rereading passages as I go along, letting it sink in as deeply as possible.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

My head won't fathom the weight of such research. My head, I imagine, would split along seams were I to stuff it so full, were I to attempt carrying the weight of so many numbers, facts, quotes.

Human nature ties disparate data points together, be they events or quotes or numbers or any litany of other things. We create connection, a relation, order in chaos; this is the way of the human brain. In other words? This book may be more human than me.

[4 stars for a sky full of strings and the simplicity with which Dillard writes.]

[Tracy Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favorite Dillard (along with Holy the Firm). Otherworldly, strange, close. This is a continual read, I start it up again when I start to feel unmoored.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.


The first Chinese emperor, Emperor Qin, commissioned 8000 clay soldiers, each unique, to be created and buried alongside his corpse rather than interring live soldiers, as was the custom of the day. Fast forward 2000 years and my younger daughter, fascinated by the commercials for the Terracotta Warriors display opening at the Royal Ontario Museum, convinced us to take a trip into the city and see the statues for ourselves. Despite the imagination-sparking of the history of the artefacts, they were, as Dillard predicted, presented in a sterile fashion, behind glass cases, no photography allowed. Happily, however, as the site in China is still being excavated, it would appear that some of the statues can yet be seen "crawling from the walls" of the dig site.


In For The Time Being, Annie Dillard revisits the question that seems to have prompted most of her nonfiction writing: How can an all-powerful God allow suffering? From what I've read, this has haunted Dillard all her life, and although I thought she was satisfied by the answer from C. S. Lewis she quotes in An American Childhood (The sum of human suffering we needn't worry about: There is plenty of suffering, but no one suffers the sum of it), here she quotes Lewis again, along with other philosophers from medieval Rabbis to Teilhard (the Jesuit paleontologist who unearthed Peking Man), still seeking a satisfactory answer. I found the following quote by Dillard, which may explain why this question is her obsession: "Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." For the Time Being seems to be yet another vehicle for Dillard to assemble her research and musings on her private fascinations.

In a rigid structure, each chapter is divided into sections labelled birth-sand-China-clouds-numbers-Israel-encounters-thinker-evil-now. Each section is filled with what seem to be random facts: information on human birth defects; the making of a grain of sand; the nature of clouds as recorded in art through history; paleontology; Kabala and Hasidism; the scale of human tragedy (comparing the loss of the one to the loss of millions, even the billions since the beginning of humanity); and random encounters with people and literature. The case is made that though God might not let the fall of the smallest sparrow escape His notice, we humans are no more important or permanent than the clouds in the sky, the grains of sand on the beach, or the buried clay soldiers.

A couple of interesting quotes:

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time- or even knew selflessness or courage or literature - but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

There might well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on the earth: This is where the people come out.

There were many interesting facts and fine writing in For The Time Being, but did I like this book? Not really. It may have been too idiosyncratic, more vanity project than meant for public consumption, or at any rate, I am not the public meant for its consumption. I have enjoyed discovering and reading Annie Dillard this year and have encountered some dense writing in her books, but this was the first time I found her dull. More than once Dillard includes quotes that she finds confusing:

Here is a puzzler from Teilhard: "The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God." That people, alone of all beings, possess souls is crucial to Teilhard's thought. Crucial also is the incandescence of matter -- its filling the universe to the exclusion of all spirit and spirits, and its blazing from within. Still: What does this sentence mean?

And so I am left not completely understanding Dillard while she includes information that she doesn't completely understand, and ultimately, the layers are too deep for me to excavate. I did, however, appreciate the bits that Dillard includes that speak to the idiosyncratic thoughts to which I advert:

"Without a doubt, time is an accident," Maimonides said, "one of the created accidents, such as blackness and whiteness."

We are food, like rolled sandwiches, for the Greek god Chronos, time, who eats his children.

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.

It's interesting to me that I read this book so soon after Hawking's A Brief History Of Time, in which he states:

According to this theory [strong anthropic principle], there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own initial configuration and, perhaps, with its own set of laws of science. In most of these universes the conditions would not be right for the development of complicated organisms; only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question: "Why is the universe the way we see it?" The answer is then simple: If it had been different, we would not be here!


Perhaps the strong anthropic principle applies also to God: Suffering is allowed on small and large scales because only those who are capable of suffering have the intelligence to ask the question, "Why?"

[Anna Snader · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit, I was wrong about Annie Dillard. I used to have an unnecessary hatred for her writing because I was never able to read past the first chapter. After reading two of her books, I realize my inability to read her writing was likely because I had not read extensive theory (which is exponentially more challenging) and could not handle her proclivity to "do too much all the time." However, now I think I was the problem. In C.S. Lewis's novel, An Experiment in Criticism, he suggests it is the reader's responsibility to make meaning out of literature, not the author's. This is true. my previous attempts to read Annie Dillard's work was no fault of hers, but of my own lack of attention and intention while reading.

The truth is, Annie Dillard is doing so much all at once because she knows what she is doing; she is so refined and experimental in her craft. For the Time Being is no exception. The book is formulated out of ten seemingly disparate strands regarding birth, death, clouds, archeology, history, religion, and on. Her writing is as expansive as it is detailed, and with continued reading and patience, one begins to recognize that these topics are converging. Is it surprising? exciting? impressive? All of it. Personally, I came away seeing Dillard's tendency to throw readers into a whirlwind of information as intentional, helping us witness the interconnectedness of our human life, the beautiful world we inhabit, and the sweeping history we are born out of.

I am left pondering this passage in particular: "Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present" (Dillard 201).

As a writer and a reader, I am humbled and inspired by what Dillard offers. I am reminded how even in a state of disorientation, it is still important for us to witness good writing and wonder about it. And besides, we often pick up more than we know.

[Catherine Meijer]

“An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: "Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other."” pg. 160

[Alaina Coulter · Rating 4 out of 5]

“One of the best stories of the early Christian desert hermits goes like this: ‘Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: Now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: why not be totally changed into fire?’”

[Rennie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love her but this one didn’t do it for me.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent example of zooming in and out in an essay. Meandering yet purposeful. It’s hard to write essays well, but Dillard is a master.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this narrative was like eating a box of assorted chocolates without knowing which was which until you bit into it; rich, grace-filled, poignantly deep, unexpected, wondering. Annie Dillard's voice resonates through the factual discoveries and paradoxes: tangents with order. You can feel her excitement as she holds up and frames the treasures she has found, like a child saying, "Look! Look at this! See that? Did you see it?"

It is a small treasure of knowledge and curiosities that slowly work their way into you.