>[!citation] >Dillard, A. (1999). *For the time being*. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. >[!abstract] >Following a novel, a memoir, and a book of poems, Annie Dillard returns to a form of nonfiction she has made her own —now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*. > >This personal narrative surveys the panorama of our world, past and present. Here is a natural history of sand, a catalogue of clouds, a batch of newborns on an obstetrical ward, a family of Mongol horsemen. Here is the story of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin digging in the deserts of China. Here is the story of Hasidic thoughts rising in Eastern Europe. Here are defects and beauty together, miracle and tragedy, time and eternity. Dillard poses questions about God, natural evil, and individual existence. Personal experience, science, and religion bear on a welter of fact. How can an individual matter? How might one live? > >Compassionate, informative, enthralling, always surprising, *For the time being* shows on of our most original writers —her breadth of knowledge matched by keen powers of observation, all of it informing her relentless curiosity— in the fullness of her powers. >[!quote] On living exceptionalism >Why do we find it supremely pertinent, during any moment of any century on earth, which among us is topside? Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of soil our feet poke? ([[Dillard, 1999]], p. 75) >[!quote] On human suffering >C. S. Lewis once noted —interestingly, salvifically— that the sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. That was a load off my mind. I had found it easier to contemplate the square root of minus one. ([[Dillard, 1999]], p. 87) >[!quote] On the consequences of natural evolution >Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution —chance operating on large numbers— so that, as the paleontologist said, “at every moment it releases a given quantity of events that cause distress (failures, disintegrations, death).” That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.” It is hard to find a more inarguable explanation for the physical catastrophe and the suffering we endure at chance from the material world. ([[Dillard, 1999]], p. 87, quoting Teilhard de Chardin) ^c3acf1