A review by rhaines46
For the Time Being by Annie Dillard

I really enjoy Annie Dillard's writing even though a lot of the time I really don't know what she's on about. Or I do know what she's on about, but I don't know what point she's trying to make about it or if she's trying to make a point at all. This book in particular feels like a mosaic of ideas and quotations and trivia and biography and memoir, like she took every interesting note she had about: holiness & grace & natural history & multitudinous humanity & vastness & time & accident & malformity & prayer & paradox and carefully built a neat little structure out of those notes. It's hard to say what exactly it all adds up to, but also: why aren't more books about everything?

"The Chinese soldiers who breathed air posing for their 7,000 individual clay portraits must have thought it a wonderful difference that workers buried only their simulacra, so their sons could buy their flesh a bit later. One wonders what they did in the months and years they gained. One wonders what one is oneself up to these days."