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| |  | The Highwaymen | Home » » » For the Time Being | | | | | | | Description: | | National Bestseller
"Beautifully written and delightfully strange--. As earthy as it is sublime, For the Time Being is, in the truest sense, an eye- opener."--Daily News
From Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, comes For the Time Being, her most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest--and often darkest--corners.
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.
"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
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Annie Dillard | | Paperback:
| 224 pages | | Publisher:
| Vintage | | Publication Date:
| February 08, 2000 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0375703470 | | Package Length:
| 7.8 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.2 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.63 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.53 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 76 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Where is this all going?Jun 22, 2009
Why write a review for a book that's been reviewed here about 75 times? Why give 5 stars to a book that seems somewhat haphazardly structured and with some parts to bore almost everybody? Don't know. But, for example:
"Spiritual path" is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope ... with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape... Nothing ... can justify the term "path" for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage - except one thing: They don't quit... Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark... Decade after decade they see no progress. But they do notice, if they look, that they have left doubt behind."
For the Time Being, as with Auden's poem of the same title, is about denial. It argues against the privilege we variously assume. It scratches unnervingly at the membrane that the constructed self maintains against the raw universe.
Get the audiotape!Jan 22, 2008
I'm not a big reader these days. I picked this up a couple of years ago at a library sale. I had never heard of Annie Dillard but it was on tape and it held some appeal. Well this is the way to go! David Birney's reading of Annie Dillards work was breathtaking! Her writing is so vivid and descriptive I could see perfectly what was being written about. I saw the clouds, the babies I saw the red earth of China. The compartmentalized topics flowed well in the reading as a movie would cut back to different storylines. I loved Birney's voice, he seemed to understand all the soulful, reflective contemplative, attitudinal turns of emotion the author seemed to intend. I recommend this to almost everyone I know-- on audio!
1 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 A breezy, cluttered rambleSep 08, 2007
The thoughts are disjointed, the insights few. Ms. Dillard, whose Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was so wonderful, delivers just notes and whimsy here in "For the Time Being." Honestly, it read like a stoner's notebook. Maybe she was high while composing it. Her editor and publisher must have been, to take such a weak work to print.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Awe-inspiring...Feb 17, 2007
Annie Dillard is just amazing; surely she must be one of the wisest people alive right now.
This relatively short collection of musings and speculations on such mundane things as clouds, deserts, and birth opened my eyes. Dillard's smart, meditative writing challenges the reader to re-evaluate the way he looks at things; she certainly succeeded with me. "For the Time Being" literally altered the way I view life.
Yes, this book's deep, but it manages to be so without ever seeming unapproachable. In fact, this is a very readable piece.
I recommend this book to anyone who can read. It's nothing short of awe-inspiring.
9 of 10 found the following review helpful:
What a combination of topics and thoughts!Aug 23, 2006
Of course I believe Annie Dillard is a national treasure. I don't know anyone else's works I so frequently refer to and give as gifts. This one I gave to a friend recently returned from a first-time visit to China. She got to visit the army of ceramic men and horses that features prominently in Dillard's book. I never expected to see this juxtaposed with thoughts on Teilhard de Chardin and his falling in love; along with her reflections on children born with rare and life-threatening conditions, and so many other topics that Dillard seems effortlessly to have at her disposal. She does not answer the very deep and important questions she raises, but instead invites us to question with her. The experience is certainly rewarding. I finished this book with a sense of the fragility (and the terror) of life as well as its absolute blessing.
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