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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."
"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."