For the Time Being: Ethnography of Everyday Life Book

This book from start to finish is a study in the passing of time. And it is the passing of the writer in the course of time. We who remain as readers - you and I - imagine another time and another place. We then move on to what is to come next. An artifact of a lived experience, this is a document of a life lived in the course of a decade. The writing - the process of writing - was part of the living. In some cases, the writing was the living, and made the living possible. Throughout the book are lines from W. H. Auden's oratorio poem titled "For the Time Being." As a mantra that runs through the book: The time being is all the time we have. It is the most trying time of all. We seek daily to redeem it from insignificance. Thus the attention given to this everyday life.

Booknews

Lyrical, contemplative, and unique, this is not a book about sociology but rather a deeply personal book written by a sociologist. The emphasis is on an existential view of the here-and-now of human existence; thus, the process of the writing and the reading of the book itself, the relationship of author to reader and of both to the text, are often brought to the foreground. The author meditates on his daily life both in the first person and in the third person, through a character he calls "the professor"; he also recounts his father's 1924 automobile trip from the midwest to California, with accompanying photographs. No index, but an interesting bibliography comprising philosophical, spiritual and poetic sources. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.