Annie Dillard is kinda known for making people look at things they’d rather ignore. In 1974, she had us staring at a giant water bug sucking the insides out of a frog in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. But by 1999, she leveled up. She wrote For the Time Being, a book that is basically an intellectual car crash between a medical textbook of birth defects, a biography of a Jesuit paleontologist, and a meditation on why there are billions of us and whether any of it actually matters.
It’s a weird book.
If you’ve ever felt like a tiny, insignificant speck in a universe that doesn't care if you live or die, this is your manual. Dillard doesn't try to comfort you with Hallmark platitudes. Instead, she piles up the facts. She talks about the 138,000 people drowned by a single cyclone in Bangladesh. She talks about the terracotta soldiers in China, thousands of them, standing in the dark for centuries.
Honestly, it’s a lot to take in.
The Structure of a "Dizzying" Masterpiece
Dillard didn't just write a bunch of essays and call it a day. She built this thing like a mosaic. There are seven chapters, and each chapter has the exact same ten sub-headings:
- Birth
- Sand
- China
- Clouds
- Numbers
- Israel
- Encounters
- Thinker
- Evil
- Now
It sounds rigid, right? Like a spreadsheet. But when you read it, it feels more like a fever dream. One second you're reading about a baby born with gills—literally, gills—and the next you're learning about the French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin digging for "Peking Man" in the dirt of China.
The "Numbers" sections are usually the ones that mess people up the most. She reminds us that there are billions of people on Earth right now. If you lined us all up, we’d wrap around the world dozens of times. Does God see each one? Or are we just "biomass"?
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Dillard doesn't answer. She just points.
Why Teilhard de Chardin and the Baal Shem Tov?
You’ve got these two main "characters" haunting the book. First, there’s Teilhard de Chardin. He was a Jesuit priest who was also a world-class paleontologist. He spent his life trying to reconcile the fact that humans are made of evolution and dirt with the idea that we are also spiritual beings.
Then you have the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.
Dillard uses these two to show how people try to find the "sparks" of the divine in the middle of a world that is often cruel and random. The Baal Shem Tov would do cartwheels to show his joy for God. Teilhard would look at a fossilized jawbone and see the hand of the creator.
She calls herself a "Hasidic Christian" in this book, which is a bit of a head-scratcher. Basically, she’s saying she’s looking for the holy in the gritty, physical reality of the world. She isn't interested in a God who stays in the clouds. She wants the God who is in the sand, the birth ward, and the mass graves.
The Problem of "Bird-Headed Dwarfs"
One of the most controversial parts of For the Time Being Annie Dillard is her obsession with a medical book called Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation.
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She describes children born with heads the size of a thumb.
Children who will never speak.
Children who look like birds.
Why?
Because she’s tackling "Theodicy." That’s the fancy theological word for "If God is good, why is the world such a disaster?"
Dillard’s take is bracingly honest. She says our sins have nothing to do with our physical fates. If a baby is born with a heart on the outside of its chest, it isn't a "punishment." It’s just what happens when "natural materials clash and replicate."
She quotes a Jewish blessing for seeing someone with a birth defect: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, WHO CHANGES THE CREATURES."
It’s a way of saying: This, too, is part of the world. Even the parts that break your heart.
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Is it a Hopeless Book?
Actually, no.
Even though she talks about Stalin starving millions and people being flayed alive with oyster shells (shoutout to the philosopher Hypatia), the book ends on a note of weird, stubborn hope.
She argues that there is "no less holiness at this time" than there was when the Red Sea parted. You don't have to live in a "holy age" to find meaning. You’re living in it right now. The "Now" sections of the book are all about that—showing up for the present moment, even if the present moment is just you sitting in traffic or dealing with a cold.
"In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree."
Actionable Insights: How to Read Dillard Without Losing Your Mind
If you're picking up For the Time Being for the first time, don't try to read it like a novel. You'll get frustrated.
- Read it in bursts. Because it’s broken into tiny sections, it’s actually perfect for short reading sessions. Read one "Birth" section and one "Sand" section, then put it down.
- Don't Google the birth defects. Seriously. Just trust Dillard’s descriptions. The point isn't to be a voyeur; it's to feel the weight of physical existence.
- Pay attention to the clouds. Dillard writes about clouds as things that are "infinite and transient." We are like that. We feel permanent, but we’re just passing through.
- Look for the "sparks." This is the Hasidic idea she loves. The world is broken, but there are sparks of light trapped in everything. Your job is to find them and "lift them up."
Ultimately, For the Time Being Annie Dillard is a book for people who are tired of easy answers. It’s for the skeptics who still want to pray and the believers who are honest enough to admit they’re terrified.
It reminds us that we are here for a very short time. We are "particles crashing about and colliding." But even in the collision, there is something sacred.
Next Steps for the Reader
To truly engage with these themes, start a "Found Beauty" log for one week. Record one thing that felt "holy" and one thing that felt "meaningless" or "random" each day. By the end of the week, look for the patterns between them, much like Dillard does with her ten recurring themes. This exercise helps move the book's philosophy from the page into your actual life.