For the Time Being

by Dillard, Annie
ISBN: 9780375703478
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Used - Trade Paperback - 9780375703478

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Overview

National Bestseller

"Beautifully written and delightfully strange...as earthy as it is sublime...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

  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Dillard, Annie
  • ISBN: 9780375703478
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.06 x 0.60
  • Number Of Pages: 224
  • Publication Year: 2000

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  • A lyrical meditation on life, nature, and spirit

    Terell P. - 6 years ago

    Annie Dillard is a difficult author to categorize, and For the Time Being may be her most eclectic book. Not a memoir, not exactly a collection of essays, Dillard writes about such divergent topics as the theology of Paul Tillich, the geology of sand dunes, the terracotta army of Xi'an China and a myriad others, making seemingly random and disparate subject matters appear effortlessly connected. Dillard writes with such a singular and purposeful vision that none of it feels disjointed or arbitrary. The consistent theme throughout is the ephemeral nature of the material world and the vast unknowable nature of existence itself. Dillard writes in spare, lyrical prose, finding both beauty and penitent awe in exploring humankind's universal mysteries.

    HPB Staff Review