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“God decants the universe of time in a stream and our best hope is, by out own awareness, to step into the stream and serve, empty as flumes, to keep it moving." – For the Time Being, 175 I read those words and know why I keep reading Annie Dillard. Poet, naturalist, philosopher, theist, I’ve lived vicariously through her rambling observations. (I still remember that time out of time in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when waits – for something like an hour! – in order to see a beaver resurface.) That being said, more than once I wondered how many publishers would have rejected my offer to write a book in the disjointed montage Dillard employs in For the Time Being. That sounds like I didn’t like this book. Not true. But you do need to let go of a need for cohesion, at least initially. Dillard has been to the reference section of the library (or that’s how I imagine it) and pulled down tombs at random, looking for words that lend themselves to deep subjects. Her note cards at the ready, she copies out by hand information that intrigues her. In the end she settles on these. BIRTH, SAND, CHINA, CLOUDS, ISRAEL, ENCOUNTERS, THINKER , EVIL and NOW which she will probe briefly in each of seven chapters. (A number intentionally chosen I suspect – intimately connected as it is with both biblical creation and full - fillment.) There is some planned cohesion, chapter to chapter, within these subjects. For example each time the heading is BIRTH we’ll observe pleasant nurses caring for healthy newborns in a modern hospital. But the reassuring warmth of those scenes is juxtaposed with images of bird-headed dwarfs and other birth anomalies drawn from Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformations. In SAND we follow the trek of Teillhard de Chardin – the Jesuit paleontologist who discovered the skull of Peking man and wonder at the way eventually all things living are buried beneath the sands of time. And so it continues with the other subjects. But though each one is a separate topic, Dillard subtly draws their threads together so ultimately they offer a translucent whole. Dillard has a burning question. How – in light of horrific malformations, malevolent evil and the apparent insignificance of individual lives – can God be merciful and good? It won’t spoil your reading pleasure to give you the answer she uncovers . “‘For the Jew the world is not complete; people must complete it.’ So said a nineteenth-century Frenchman, Edmund Fleg. Recently Lawrence Kushner stated the same idea powerfully and bluntly: ‘God does not have hands, we do. Our hands are God’s. It is up to us what God see and hear, up to us what God will do. Humanity is the organ of consciousness…Without our eyes, the Holy On of Being would be blind.’” (196) Which is why Dillard keeps stepping into the stream God decants, trusting as Rabbi Tarfon once said “The work is not yours to finish, but neither are you free to take no part in it.” (202) <back to list |
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