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Annie Dillard

For the Time Being Paperback – February 8, 2000

by Annie Dillard (Author)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time comes a "beautifully written and delightfully strange" (Daily News) narrative that renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest—and often darkest—corners.

For the Time Being is Annie Dillard's most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard asks: 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.

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

"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

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

February 8, 2000
Dimensions

5.14 x 0.6 x 8.02 inches
ISBN-10

0375703470
ISBN-13

978-0375703478
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Editorial Reviews

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 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

From the Back Cover

Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, searches for answers in 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 even the darkest and most remote of life's corners.

This personal narrative surveys the panorama of our world. The natural history of sand. The dizzying variety of clouds. 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, troublingly beyond our understanding.

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Vintage Books Ed edition (February 8, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375703470
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375703478
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.14 x 0.6 x 8.02 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #102,749 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #144 in Nature Writing & Essays
- #362 in Essays (Books)
- #3,937 in Social Sciences (Books)

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Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.

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285 global ratings

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3 star		6%
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Birth, Clouds, and Numbers

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 29, 2014

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I've been procrastinating the review of this book, not because I didn't like it but rather because I enjoyed this marvelous work so much that I knew I couldn't do it justice. It's that good! Truly, I've never read anything quite like it.

For The Time Being is educational, interesting, and quite thought-provoking. Dillard begins the book with a description of two bird-headed dwarfs, and then she jumps to a passage from the Talmud about a blessing said when seeing a person deformed from birth. "What's this book about?" I asked myself as I read about chromosomes, sand, God, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, China, clouds, Confucius, numbers (chickens outnumber humans four to one and more than 3 percent of humans are mentally retarded), Israel, birth, evil, encounters, and sand.

There is so much information that I've read the book twice and am still discovering things I didn't see before. And it's all written in such an engaging manner! I learned about the Baal Shem Tov, Hasidic rabbis, and Emperor Qin who declared himself the first emperor of China 2,200 years ago. I learned about Happy-puppet syndrome, why sandstorms nauseate people, and new words like dummkopf and dunlin. And yet, the book isn't like a textbook.

There are dozens of highlighted passages and short quotes in the book, but this is one of my favorites. It's by Teilhard. "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."

For the Time Being is fascinating, informative, and interesting. I highly recommend it to anyone who is genuinely curious about the world and its people, past and present, and who wants to think outside of his or her narrow worldview.

14 people found this helpful

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S.Z. M.

Building a foundation of stories that leads to the profound

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 26, 2014

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For the first part of this book, I read with interest, the seeming disconnected topics:Birth, Sand, Clouds, China, Encounters, Numbers, Israel, Thinkers, Evil, Now.
I read because I know from her early work how she will blend the information and her thoughts about it into something that sits on you and resonates for days afterwards. I read because I want to see how she does it. I am always floored by the way she mixes deep thoughts with levity.
I am not disappointed when I reach page 77 and find: a quotation: "Suddeny there is a point where religion becomes laughable,", Thomas Merton wrote. "Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious." Suddenly!"she responds.
When I get to page 118 I am smitten again. Especially in the section called NOW: "Trafficking directly with the divine, as the manna-eating wilderness generation did, and as Jesus did, confers no immunity to death or hazard. 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 colliding in a welter of materials without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials."
She draws on quotations of deep thinkers of all philosophies, including Buddhist and Hebrew as well as Christian..
She reminds us of our mortality, and how difficult it is for us to accept it, and in her usual curiosity, offers questions for everyone, for herself, for God. "We are only about three hundred generations from ten thousand years ago." she reminds us.
Stories, quotations, experiences, ideas build until you get the connections, or at least keep thinking.
Suzanne
.
,

17 people found this helpful

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Dr. Tom King

We have all the time there is for the time being. Leave something behind besides your bones.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 26, 2017

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When they give you a Pulitzer for literature before you're of age, you know there's a burden of great expectations ahead of you. So it's been these many years since for Annie Dillard. At her best, which is often, her descriptions are terse, pithy and still transcendant.

She writes of buried Chinese statuary, and at the same time reminds us all, over a long enough time, we too will be buried my microscopic eflluvia....dust. A thousand years will do it. If the world goes on, some day in the future, paleontologists will be looking for us. in her own words, "....if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not."

She speaks of hospitals this way: "This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time.” We each were "inners" one time, wrapped tightly by the nurse, she says, in a swaddling blanket. The outers lie ahead of us, but for the time being....of which we have less and less.

There are morals to all her stories, fiction and non-, but you hare to derive your own. If you want a moral worth having, follow this story-teller whose book leaves are worth parsing.

13 people found this helpful

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Oddsfish

The Mystery

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 17, 2003

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For the Time Being is one of my favorite books. Annie Dillard, as always, is taking on the Big questions. She's asking the questions that we all have to ask (whether we realize it or not), and she does so in the most honest, most innovative, and most insightful ways possible.
In For the Time Being, Dillard is exploring the problem of evil. She discusses such horrors as birth defects, torture, and mass murders, and she cries out to God, "What's with all the bird-headed dwarfs!" She's referring to a debilitating birth defect. She's asking how does God allow such atrocities? Is there a God if this type of world exists?
Dillard reviews the traditional arguments about the problem of evil. Her conclusion: "I don't know beans about God." She quotes Augustine, "We're talking about God. What wonder is it you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God." But though she doesn't understand God, she still does decide to live in a universe for love. Love (=God) is still worth living for, and that's her message, I think. Delve into the mystery that is God and that is love.
I can't do justice to this book. It is one of those that I love a bit too much. Just read it. It's an experience like no other.

8 people found this helpful

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S Litton

Random but fascinating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 3, 2016

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So, lots of fascinating tidbits, stories and observations here. She's especially good on numbers and the scale of the world and our place in it, and doing her best to make you feel humble and insignificant, which is nice. And the stuff about birth defects is eye-opening (and eye-watering).
Less interesting, for me at least, was all the stuff about theologians' debates about the nature, powers and attitudes of God. And the way she hopped from one story or thread to another in the space of a few lines was irritating. Maybe she was challenging us to find the connections, and there were some, but at other times it read like random jottings in a notebook, and I prefer my books to be a little more...finished.

Mrs. P. Czyzak-dannenbaum

compelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 15, 2013

Verified Purchase

Annie Dillard is interesting in an idiosyncratic but serious way. she sometimes blindsides with quirky views but they always caused me anyway to stop and think.

One person found this helpful

dedred

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 6, 2019

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Brilliant

DM SHERWOOD

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 7, 2014

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Life the Universe & Everything

#1

Timeless

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 20, 2019

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This book is its own photographic memoir of tragedy transformed into beauty through the heartfelt wordsmithing of Annie Dillard. Though the book appears small, the message is powerfully impactful.

2 people found this helpful

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