This may just be a perfect book.

Annie Dillard’s known for her spiritual depth as well as her writing chops. Both are on full display here.

Consider the structure. Each of the seven chapters follow the same heading format: Birth, Sand, China, Clouds, Numbers, Israel, Encounters, Thinker, Evil, Now. At the start of the book the themes are loosely related, at best. By the end, the reader can see the full tapestry of Dillard’s meditations on everything from the shape of grains of sand to the love life of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, from birth deformities to time and eternity.

Prominent in these meditations are reflections on God’s benevolence and suffering. Dillard begins chapter one by thumbing through Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation, describing pictures of “bird-headed dwarfs” (3). How do you reconcile human suffering with the divine?

The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. (85)

For the Time Being is difficult to describe. Books in Canada blurbed it well: “ultimately, it’s the kind of book that can be carried around for months, to be used as a digest, oracle, guidebook, and hymnal on the path of grace and clumsiness on which we are all placed.”

This was my first reading, but it will not be my last.

Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. Penguin Books, 2000.