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
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
ANNIE DILLARD lives in Middletown, Connecticut.
"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
"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
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. 60,000 first printing. (Mar.)
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
