Reviews for For the Time Being

The average rating for For the Time Being based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-11 00:00:00 Bob Cslob 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-05 00:00:00 Eugene Carlisle 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.