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A review by jonscott9
For the Time Being by Annie Dillard
4.0
So many people I know (or have known) read this in our university days, so of course I picked it up 20 years onward. And, damn, just too many gorgeous little passages to quote any as if above the others. As this read went on, I wondered how Dillard would wrap it up. She didn't do so tidily, of course; the way this ends is as profoundly simple and existential as the rest of this book. Truly, there are a couple dozen poignant, almost-staggering questions posed in this book that made me glad I was sitting down at the time.
Chock-full of esoteric information and compelling narrative, mostly from decades and centuries ago, Dillard moves among naturalist and literary ponderings, anthropology and archaeology, with great ease and greater wit.
So much stories and morsels throughout this tome could be just as easily read as scattershot and oddly packaged. I find Dillard binds them all together in clever, perceptive ways. Everything that has been still is and always will be.
Everything from terra cotta warriors to newborn babies being swaddled by nurses, from the famous to the everyday person, gets some time in the light here. There's a lot of reliance on the thoughts and writings of Simone Weil. Among holy books, Dillard is as apt to quote from ancient texts as the Torah, Buddhist teachings or the Qur'an as the Bible. This is among the litany of reasons I appreciate her. She contextualizes perspectives, places and people and frames them in ways that honor their times and cultures, their nuances and contradictions. Her topics and characters always contain multitudes.
Particularly poignant are those passages about ancient and more modern-day China, Israel and Palestine, given current states of these lands and peoples. Also gripping are the late-in-book vignettes about a schoolgirl in the Northeast who goes missing during a trip to a forest. I believe Dillard makes her something of a literary sister to the young girl, her face disfigured by a fire, who is central to Dillard's brief masterpiece, Holy the Firm.
Chock-full of esoteric information and compelling narrative, mostly from decades and centuries ago, Dillard moves among naturalist and literary ponderings, anthropology and archaeology, with great ease and greater wit.
So much stories and morsels throughout this tome could be just as easily read as scattershot and oddly packaged. I find Dillard binds them all together in clever, perceptive ways. Everything that has been still is and always will be.
Everything from terra cotta warriors to newborn babies being swaddled by nurses, from the famous to the everyday person, gets some time in the light here. There's a lot of reliance on the thoughts and writings of Simone Weil. Among holy books, Dillard is as apt to quote from ancient texts as the Torah, Buddhist teachings or the Qur'an as the Bible. This is among the litany of reasons I appreciate her. She contextualizes perspectives, places and people and frames them in ways that honor their times and cultures, their nuances and contradictions. Her topics and characters always contain multitudes.
Particularly poignant are those passages about ancient and more modern-day China, Israel and Palestine, given current states of these lands and peoples. Also gripping are the late-in-book vignettes about a schoolgirl in the Northeast who goes missing during a trip to a forest. I believe Dillard makes her something of a literary sister to the young girl, her face disfigured by a fire, who is central to Dillard's brief masterpiece, Holy the Firm.