For the Time Being - ISBNLookup.com

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

...[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.
—The New York Times

Nan Goldberg

In Dillard’s meditation on the meaning of life, she focuses on such diverse phenomena as the evolution of sand, human deformities, evil and “acts of God” 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’t 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, “That’s easy. Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.” Her subjects aren’t 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.

James Zug

A testament to a rare and redeeming curiosity...an exhilaratinggraceful roundelay of profound questions and suppositioins about the human adventure in nature. —Outside Magazine

Donna Seaman

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. —Booklist

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

Erik Huber

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.
— Time Out New York

Patrice Koelsch

The form...is almost musical: variations on themes, themes on astonishing variations....Dillard doesn't wrestle with big metaphysical concepts....Instead, she flashes an artist's kaleidoscope....I can't shake the suspicion that Dillard's mystical pan-entheism is spiritual Prozac for those who suffer from very real philosophical anxiety and depression.
— Hungry Mind Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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.

KLIATT

Annie Dillard is known for her thoughtful meditations on nature and on the nature of existence. Her essays in her award-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek cause the reader to pause and consider each sentence. Both the beautiful and grotesque come together with shocking ease on one page. This characteristic continues in For the Time Being—a book where time leaps decades, centuries, and millennium. From present-day China to China with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the 1920s, from distorted babies in San Diego in 1988 to ancient quotations in the Talmud, For the Time Being crosses eras and ideas and images in a sometimes dizzying whirl. Some images linger, some scenes—like that of Teilhard de Chardin—we want to know more about, but the overall flow is not as even as some earlier work. The ebbs and currents cause a bumpy ride. Annie Dillard has grown spiritually since Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and this work reflects that growth in a frank and mature way. The world troubles Dillard and her thoughts on those troubles are worth reading, but this is a step in her progress. There will be more thoughts, more sentences to consider as she goes. Recommended for all public and academic libraries. KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students, and adults. 1999, Random House/Vintage, 205p, 21cm, 98-36720, $12.00. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: Katherine E. Gillen; Libn., Luke AFB Lib., AZ, September 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 5)

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.--Carolyn M. Craft, Longwood Coll., Farmville, VA

Booknews

A popular novelist and poet surveys the panorama of our world, past and present. She offers a natural history of sand, describes a batch of newborns on an obstetrical ward, chronicles a family of Mongol horsemen, and tells the story of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin digging the deserts of China. She brings together defect and beauty, miracle and tragedy, and poses questions about God, nature, evil, and individual existence. No index. 5.5x8<">. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Wendy Lesser

...[C]oncern about the relationship of the one to the many — the individual death, for which we feel grief, set against the incomprehensibly numerous deaths — pervades Dillard's book.
— The New York Times Book Review

Patrice Koelsch

The form...is almost musical: variations on themes, themes on astonishing variations....Dillard doesn't wrestle with big metaphysical concepts....[Instead,] she flashes an artist's kaleidoscope....I can't shake the suspicion that Dillard's mystical pan-entheism is spiritual Prozac for those who suffer from very real philosophical anxiety and depression.
— Hungry Mind Review

Paul Feigenbaum

...Dillard muses on those expanses of space and time that, in John Updike's words, "conspire to crush the humans."
— WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

Donna Seaman

Steven Harvey

James Zug

A testament to a rare and redeeming curiosity...an exhilarating, graceful roundelay of profound questions and suppositioins about the human adventure in nature.
— Outside Magazine

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). 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 questions—life 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 author's 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 Q'in. These soldiers represent the might of the great emperor—but in Dillard's 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 itsliced 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.