For the Time BeingFollowing a novel, a memoir, and a book of poems, Annie Dillard returns to a form of nonfiction she has made her own--now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This personal narrative surveys the panorama of our world, past and present. Here is a natural history of sand, a catalogue of clouds, a batch of newborns on an obstetrical ward, a family of Mongol horsemen. Here is the story of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin digging in the deserts of China. Here is the story of Hasidic thought rising in Eastern Europe. Here are defect and beauty together, miracle and tragedy, time and eternity. Dillard poses questions about God, natural evil, and individual existence. Personal experience, science, and religion bear on a welter of fact. How can an individual matter? How might one live? Compassionate, informative, enthralling, always surprising, For the Time Being shows one of our most original writers--her breadth of knowledge matched by keen powers of observation, all of it informing her relentless curiosity--in the fullness of her powers. |
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alive Baal Shem Tov baby beaches bird-headed dwarfs birth blade blessing blue bodies bones Bratslav buried called cave century China Chinese Christian clay clouds dance dead death desert dirt divine earth Emperor Qin Ernest Becker evil exile eyes face feet footprints Galilee girl God's ground hair hands Hasids head heaven holy human hundred infant Isaac Luria Israel Jerusalem Jews Kabbalah killed lamps later layer legs lifted living loess looked Lord Lucile Swan Martin Buber million mountains move Nelly Sachs newborn night Nurse Pat Eisberg once Ordos paleontologist Peking prayed prayer priest Rabbi Akiva river rock Roman Rome Roy Chapman Andrews Safad sand Sea of Galilee Simchat Torah soil soldiers Solutrean someone souls sparks spirit stone stream Talmud Teilhard things thinkers thought thousand tion tree walked wall waves Whistling-face wind woman wrote Zhoukoudian