For the Time Being - by Annie Dillard (Paperback)

About the Book

On the 25th anniversary of her acclaimed "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, " Dillard presents a compassionate, informative, enthralling, and always surprising personal narrative that surveys the panorama of the world, past and present.

Book Synopsis

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

From the Back Cover

Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, searches for answers in 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 even the darkest and most remote of life's corners.

This personal narrative surveys the panorama of our world. The natural history of sand. The dizzying variety of clouds. 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. Vivid, eloquent, and haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly, troublingly beyond our understanding.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

ANNIE DILLARD is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. Dillard died in 2026.