Over the last three decades, Annie Dillard has written about an uncommon number of things--predators and prose, astronomy and evolution, the miraculous survival of mangroves. Yet the sheer range of her interests can be deceptive. Whatever the subject, Dillard is always (as she wrote in Living by Fiction) practicing unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup, always asking the fundamental questions about life and death. And this epistemological interrogation continues in For the Time Being. Here Dillard alternates accounts of her own travels to China and Israel with ruminations on sand, clouds, obstetrics, and Hasidic thought. She also records the wanderings of paleontologist and spade-wielding spiritualist Teilhard de Chardin, whose itinerary (geographical and philosophical) has certain similarities to her own. But as she ties together these disparate threads with truly Emersonian eloquence, it becomes clear that God's presence--or absence--is at the heart of her book.

There are, of course, facts aplenty here: the author is among our keenest living observers of the natural world (check out her soft-core account of two snails mating in chapter 7). But all roads lead Dillard back to God, who seems to be practicing a divine variant of benign neglect: God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to be born as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men--or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome--than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least unlikely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call "acts of God." Natural calamity is an old fascination of the author's, going clear back to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. Here it allows her to make her strongest argument yet on behalf of the Almighty's laissez-faire policy--while suggesting that His immanence in fact depends on our belief.

Yet even in her earnest pursuit of holiness, Dillard tends to hit the occasional speed bump. At one point she throws up her hands in exasperation and declares: "I don't know beans about God." This is hardly the stuff of an airtight theological argument, is it? But happily, Dillard possesses the same quality she ascribes to Teilhard, "a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox." So her contradictions are worth more to the reader than her consistencies. They enrich her narrative, yanking her back from the precipice of easy (or even moderately easy) belief. And Dillard's penchant for paradox ensures that For the Time Being--which aims, after all, to encompass God and all his works--always operates on a human, heartbreaking scale. --James Marcus


From Publishers Weekly
Writing as if on the edge of a precipice, staring over into the abyss, Dillard offers a risk-taking, inspiring meditation on life, death, birth, God, evil, eternity, the nuclear age and the human predicament. This unconventional mosaic, portions of which were first published in different form in Raritan, Harper's, etc., interweaves several disparate topics: the travels of French paleontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin in China and Mongolia, where his team in 1928 discovered the world's first fossil evidence of pre-Neanderthal humans; the life and teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, the 18th-century Ukrainian Jewish mystic who founded modern Hasidism; a natural history of sand?an epic drama of rocks, glaciers, lichen, rivers?and of individual clouds as witnessed by painters, poets, naturalists, scientists and laypeople. Rounding out this fugue are Dillard's visits to an obstetrical ward to watch healthy newborns emerge; her survey of tragic, horrific human birth defects; random encounters with strangers; her trips to Israel, where she visited Jesus' birthplace, and to China, where, at the tomb of the first Chinese emperor, Qin?mass murderer, burner of books, Mao's idol?she inspected the terra-cotta army of life-size soldiers who guard Qin in the afterlife. Dillard's unifying theme is the congruence of thought she detects in Teilhard, Kabbalists and Gnostics: each impels us to transform, build, complete and grant divinity to the world. Her cosmic perspective can seem like posturing at times, yet it succeeds admirably in forcing us to confront our denial of death, of the world's suffering, of the interconnectedness of all people. Her razor-sharp lyricism hones this mind-expanding existential scrapbook, which is imbued with the same spiritual yearning, moral urgency and reverence for nature that has informed nearly all of her nonfiction since the 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 60,000 first printing. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1972, has written another splendid meditative and spiritual book. Reflecting on places (from the Wailing Wall to the Great Wall), people (from mass murderers to martyrs of various faiths), and events (from the birth of severely deformed babies to attempts at delaying death), Dillard shares doubts, hopes, and insights that cut across religious boundaries and plumb human perplexities. She leads the reader into deeper questions, considerations of ultimate mystery, and a sense of the holy in the midst of the profane and even the terrible. Suitable for those of various religious traditions as well as unaffiliated seekers and highly recommended for all libraries.ACarolyn M. Craft, Longwood Coll., Farmville, VACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Wendy Lesser
Annie Dillard writes with the fury of someone obsessed with an idea.... The subject, at any rate, unleashes Annie Dillard's most impassioned rhetoric.


The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
...because of the book's imagery what you experience is not purely mental but sensuous as well. While it may not promise the immanence of a benevolent God at the end of this brutal 20th century, it does offer the pleasure of Ms. Dillard's poetry, and maybe just a flicker of hope in her finally optimistic moral vision.


From AudioFile
This is not a story, but a philosophical, meditative exploration of the world around us. It mixes history, spirituality, and keen observation to create a thoughtful, intelligent work. Narrator David Birney is exactly the right choice for this book. He understands that Dillard has written a personal book that has many interpretations. His voice is substantial, soft, and pleasingly familiar. At the same time that Birney forces us to think about what we're hearing, he allows us to digest the author's words without feeling rushed. The book covers a few themes and returns to each from time to time. Birney's pace and emphasis remind us of where we've been, then take us off to the next destination. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
A work of piercing loveliness and sadness, an inquiry into the meaning and significance of life, from Pulitzer-winner Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1972; The Living, 1992; etc.). Early on in her inquiry, Dillard quotes St. Augustine: We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God. It is this dilemma, the incomprehensibility of God and our profound need to understand, that underlie this graceful examination of the big questionslife and death, good and evil, the source of holiness. Dillard considers these cosmic issues by looking at the particular, whether a blue crab spied in the desert or a newborn being bathed and swaddled by a nurse. Agilely, Dillard weaves together several narrative threads that seem disparate but that through the poetry of her thought and style come together into an Ecclesiastes-like series of examinations. A thread called Sand follows paleontologist and religious thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin through his long exile to China and the journey on which he discovered Peking Man. And China is set during the authors own trip to the East, when she witnessed the unearthing of thousands of statues, an army of clay soldiers dating back 2,200 years and intended to guard the grave of the ancient Emperor Qin. These soldiers represent the might of the great emperorbut in Dillards delicate inquiry, they come also to represent his cruelty and by extension the cruelty of tyrants throughout history and, by further extension, all calamities, even natural, that have befallen humankind. Seeing the broad earth under the open sky, she writes of the clay army, and a patch of it sliced deep into corridors from which bodies emerge, surprised many people to tears. Who would not weep from shock? I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity, I seemed long dead and looking down. One of those very rare works that will bear rereading and rereading again, each time revealing something new of itself. (First printing of 60,000) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"At heart Annie Dillard's work is a record of her search for God . . . [and] For the Time Being is a brilliant book that . . . sums up God more succinctly than she ever has before."
--David Bowman, Salon Magazine

"This uncommon book is a testament to a rare and redeeming curiosity . . . an exhilarating, graceful roundelay of profound questions and suppositions about the human adventure in nature. And as always, reading Dillard makes this mind-expanding experience an emotional one . . . with a voice blending clear-eyed factuality with prismatic meditations on ineffable things."
--James Zug, Outside Magazine

"Writing as if on the edge of a precipice, staring over into the abyss, Dillard offers a risk-taking, inspiring meditation on life, death, birth, God, evil, eternity, the nuclear age and the human predicament. Her razor-sharp lyricism hones this mind-expanding existential scrapbook, which is imbued with the same spiritual yearning, moral urgency and reverence for nature that has informed nearly all of her nonfiction since the 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."
--Publishers Weekly

"This absorbing meditation . . . [is] a spare yet exquisitely wrought narrative . . . By turns funny, flinty, and sublime, Dillard meshes the historical, the scientific, the theological, and the personal in a valiant effort to net life's paradoxes and wonders."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"A work of piercing loveliness and sadness . . . One of those very rare works that will bear rereading and rereading again, each time revealing something new of itself."
--Kirkus Reviews


From the Hardcover edition.


Review
"At heart Annie Dillard's work is a record of her search for God . . . [and] For the Time Being is a brilliant book that . . . sums up God more succinctly than she ever has before."
--David Bowman, Salon Magazine

"This uncommon book is a testament to a rare and redeeming curiosity . . . an exhilarating, graceful roundelay of profound questions and suppositions about the human adventure in nature. And as always, reading Dillard makes this mind-expanding experience an emotional one . . . with a voice blending clear-eyed factuality with prismatic meditations on ineffable things."
--James Zug, Outside Magazine

"Writing as if on the edge of a precipice, staring over into the abyss, Dillard offers a risk-taking, inspiring meditation on life, death, birth, God, evil, eternity, the nuclear age and the human predicament. Her razor-sharp lyricism hones this mind-expanding existential scrapbook, which is imbued with the same spiritual yearning, moral urgency and reverence for nature that has informed nearly all of her nonfiction since the 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."
--Publishers Weekly

"This absorbing meditation . . . [is] a spare yet exquisitely wrought narrative . . . By turns funny, flinty, and sublime, Dillard meshes the historical, the scientific, the theological, and the personal in a valiant effort to net life's paradoxes and wonders."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"A work of piercing loveliness and sadness . . . One of those very rare works that will bear rereading and rereading again, each time revealing something new of itself."
--Kirkus Reviews


From the Hardcover edition.


Book Description
National Bestseller

"Beautifully written and delightfully strange--. As earthy as it is sublime, For the Time Being is, in the truest sense, an eye- opener."--Daily News

From Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, comes For the Time Being, her most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest--and often darkest--corners.

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; the dizzying variety of clouds. Vivid, eloquent, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.

"Stimulating, humbling, original--. [Dillard] illuminate[s] the human perspective of the world, past, present and future, and the individual's relatively inconsequential but ever so unique place in it."--Rocky Mountain News



From the Inside Flap
National Bestseller

"Beautifully written and delightfully strange--. As earthy as it is sublime, For the Time Being is, in the truest sense, an eye- opener."--Daily News

From Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, comes For the Time Being, her most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest--and often darkest--corners.

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; the dizzying variety of clouds. Vivid, eloquent, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.

"Stimulating, humbling, original--. [Dillard] illuminate[s] the human perspective of the world, past, present and future, and the individual's relatively inconsequential but ever so unique place in it."--Rocky Mountain News


About the Author
Annie Dillard lives in Middletown, Connecticut.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I have in my hands the standard manual of human birth defects. Smith's Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation, fourth edition, by Kenneth Lyons Jones, M.D., professor of pediatrics at UC-San Diego, 1988, is a volume to which, in conscience, I cannot recommend your prolonged attention. In vivid photographs, it depicts many variations in our human array.

        This photograph shows, for example, the bird-headed dwarfs. They are a brother and sister; they sit side by side on a bed. The boy, a blond, is six years old, says the caption, and the girl, brown-haired, is three. Indeed their smooth bodies and clear faces make them look, at first and second glances, to be six and three years old. Both are naked. They have drawn their legs up to their chests. The camera looks down on them. The girl has a supercilious expression, and seems to be looking down her nose at the camera. Bright children often show this amused and haughty awareness: "And who might you be, Bub?"

         The girl's nose is large, her eyes are large, her forehead recedes a bit, and her jaw is small. Her limbs are thin but not scrawny. Her thoughtful big brother looks quite like her. His nose is big. His eyes are enormous. He gazes off to the side, as if wishing he were somewhere else, or reflecting that this camera session will be over soon. His blond hair, cut rather Frenchily in layers, looks ruffled from playing.

        "Friendly and pleasant," the text says of bird-headed dwarfs; they suffer "moderate to severe mental deficiency." That is, the bird-headed dwarf girl whose face I read as showing amused and haughty awareness may, I hope, have been both aware and amused in her life, but she was likely neither haughty nor bright. The cerebrums of both the boy and the girl are faulty. The cerebrum shows a "simple primitive convolutional pattern resembling that of a chimpanzee." They have only eleven pairs of ribs apiece; they cannot straighten their legs; like many bird-headed dwarfs, they have displaced hips. Others have displaced elbows. "Easily distracted," the text says.

        The stunning thing is the doctor's hand, which you notice at third glance: It shows the children in scale. The doctor's hand props the boy up by cupping his shoulders--both his shoulders--from behind. The six-year-old's back, no longer than the doctor's open hand, is only slightly wider than a deck of cards. The children's faces are the length of the doctor's thumb. These people have, as a lifelong symptom, "severe short stature." The boy is the size of an eleven-month-old infant; the girl is the size of a four-month-old infant. If they live and grow, and get their hips fixed, they can expect to reach a height of about three feet. One bird-headed dwarf lived to be seventy-five years old, no taller than a yardstick.

        And friendly and pleasant, but easily distracted. There is a lot to be said for children who are friendly and pleasant. And you--are you easily distracted yourself, these days?

        If your child were a bird-headed dwarf, mentally deficient, you could carry him everywhere. The bird-headed dwarfs and all the babies in Smith's manual have souls, and they all can--and do--receive love and give love. If you gave birth to two bird-headed dwarfs, as these children's mother did--a boy and a girl--you could carry them both everywhere, all their lives, in your arms or in a basket, and they would never leave you, not even to go to college.


        The Talmud specifies a certain blessing a man says when he sees a person deformed from birth. All the Talmudic blessings begin "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who . . .". The blessing for this occasion, upon seeing a hunchback or a midget or anyone else deformed from birth, is "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, WHO CHANGES THE CREATURES."

        A chromosome crosses or a segment snaps, in the egg or the sperm, and all sorts of people result. You cannot turn a page in Smith's Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation [[ital]] without your heart pounding from simple terror. You cannot brace yourself. Will this peculiar baby live? What do you hope? The writer calls the paragraph describing each defect's effects, treatment, and prognosis "Natural History." Here is a little girl about two years old. She is wearing a dress with a polka-dot collar. The two sides of her face do not meet normally. Her eyes are far apart, and under each one is a nostril. She has no nose at all, only a no-man's-land of featureless flesh and skin, an inch or two wide, that roughly bridges her face's halves. You pray that this grotesque-looking child is mentally deficient as well. But she is not. "Normal intelligence," the text says.

        Of some vividly disfigured infants and children--of the girl who has long hair on her cheeks and almost no lower jaw, of the three-fingered boy whose lower eyelids look as if he is pulling them down to scare someone, of the girl who has a webbed neck and elbows, "rocker-bottom" feet, "sad, fixed features," and no chin--the text says, "Intelligence normal. Cosmetic surgery recommended."

        Turn the page. What could cosmetic surgery do for these two little boys? Their enormous foreheads bulge like those of cartoon aliens; their noses are tiny and pinched, the size of rose thorns; and they lack brows, lashes, and chins. "Normal intelligence."

        Of God, the kabbalah asserts: Out of that which is not, He made that which is. He carved great columns from the impalpable ether.


        Here is one fine smiling infant. Why is a fine smiling infant pictured in this manual? You must read it. The infant does indeed present the glad sight of a newborn baby, but it will develop oddly. Note the tight fist--the expert in the manual points it out to the attending pediatrician--and observe the tiny pit in the skin just before the ear, or the loose skin at the back of the neck. Observe the "thin sparse hair," "small nose," and subtly small fingernails. What baby, you cry, lacks these features?

        These particular babies look normal, or very, very close to normal--close, but no cigar. "Average IQ 50," the text says, or "30." Of Hurler syndrome babies, who are very short, with claw hands, cloudy corneas, short necks, and coarse features: "These patients are usually placid . . . and often loveable. Death usually occurs in childhood."

        According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.


        Do you suffer what a French paleontologist called "the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars"? For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, but for credibility's sake let's start with the bad news.


        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 know.

        Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This personal narrative surveys the panorama of our world, past and present. Here is a natural history of sand, a catalogue of clouds, a batch of newborns on an obstetrical ward, a family of Mongol horsemen. Here is the story of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin digging in the deserts of China. Here is the story of Hasidic thought rising in Eastern Europe. Here are defect and beauty together, miracle and tragedy, time and eternity. Dillard poses questions about God, natural evil, and individual existence. Personal experience, science, and religion bear on a welter of fact. How can an individual matter? How might one live?

FROM THE CRITICS

Nan Goldberg

In Dillard￯﾿ﾽs meditation on the meaning of life, she focuses on such diverse phenomena as the evolution of sand, human deformities, evil and ￯﾿ﾽacts of God￯﾿ﾽ such as tidal waves and earthquakes, as well as on the wisdom of such religious scholars as Maimonides, Teillard de Chardin and the Baal Shem Tov. It doesn￯﾿ﾽt come together all that coherently, but Dillard sums up some human truths in images that are unforgettable. Struggling to imagine the idea of more than one hundred and sixty-thousand East Pakistanis drowning in a single tidal wave in 1970, Dillard mentions it to her seven-year-old daughter, who immediately responds, ￯﾿ﾽThat￯﾿ﾽs easy. Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.￯﾿ﾽ Her subjects aren￯﾿ﾽt easy or pleasant, but they are endlessly challenging. The reading by David Birney is okay, although he occasionally reads the more appalling segments with a sarcasm or bitterness that is the equivalent of kicking a dead horse.

Erik Huber - Time Out New York

Dillard, who frequently quotes form the notebooks of others, seems to be publishing a notebook of her own. Sometimes her book seems the literary equivalent of a mix tape, the relations between threads rarely rising above the level of simplistic corollaries. Her book's mingling of the transcendent and the material, in an apparent effort to demonstrate the immanence of God in all things, makes it seem to be about everything and nothing at all, a compendium of meaning so inclusive it fails to mean very much.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times

...[D]isturbing....By degrees a pattern establishes itself in the text....From this pattern several fundamental questions arise....Why doesn't Ms. Dillard simply ask these questions and set about to answer them directly? Because the power of her stories and imagery heightens our desire for answers [and offers] the pleasure of Ms. Dillard's poetry in her finally optimistic moral vision.

Steven Harvey

Incantory, serious, surprising and timeless...She once again takes on the impossible, plunging into her obsessions with passion, a verbal street fighter in the back alley of the greatest human mystery. —Atlanta Journal Constitution

Patrice Koelsch - Hungry Mind Review