For the Time Being - Annie Dillard

"Does God cause natural calamity? What might be the relationship of the Absolute to a lost schoolgirl in a plaid skirt? Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?"

I know, I know. Its been over two weeks since my last post and I know I've left everyone hanging. I just want to apologize to both of my readers for my absence... The last few weeks have been particularly hectic what with the moving to San Diego permanently, writing syllabuses for my classes which begin on Wednesday, and most especially realphabetizing The Eastin Collection. But more on that next week...

The book we are talking about today breaks the typical genre even more than Emily Dickinson. I'm sure you've noticed by now that the larger portion of my collection is novels or short stories. And barring Emily, nearly everything I own contains a standard narrative of some sort. Annie Dillard, on the other hand, was my first introduction to a genre known as Creative Non-fiction.

Like so many of my books For The Time Being became part of my collection as a result of a college class. Originally I had been skeptical of creative non-fiction and even more dubious of reading an author who was still alive! For The Time Being came out in 1999 which makes it one of around five books that I've read in the past ten years that were published in my lifetime. As a medievalist I've become somewhat skeptical of new works and have a tendency to sequester myself amidst dusty tomes that with pages that smell rich and aged rather than the decadent white of a new book. To cut to the point; Dillard blasted all of my sketpicism with this truly incredible book.

To attempt to create a summary of For The Time Being would not only be unproductive but inarticulate. The best way to describe the book is to treat it as a collage of smaller narratives that, when considered all together, create a marvelous picture of humanity attempting to make sense of its temporal moment. Dillard mixes short vignettes of everything from discussions of birth defects to the trials of mid-century rabbis to a man standing alone by the Great Wall of China. One cannot read each snippet and expect to gain any sense of direction but once one arrives at the final pages and draws ones consciousness back for a moment, only then can we see what it is that Dillard has created. It is not a painting that began with sketching and slowly developed layers, but rather a jigsaw puzzle, where each little piece is a polished fragment of the whole that can only be understood once it is set in its place in the whole puzzle.

I wish I could do Dillard's book more justice and though I rarely like to recommend books to people, mostly because I know my own reading list is so long that I can only limply accept recommendations from others, I have to say that For The Time Being may entirely reboot how you understand the narrative and completely restructure how you understand your place in this vast, weird, beautiful, and cathartic world.
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Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Random House, 1999.

The Complete Poems - Emily Dickinson

"When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death."

You may have noticed that of all the books I have discussed so far none of them have contained more than a few lines of poetry. As a student of literature I must understand and appreciate the significance of poetic expression and the vast array of forms and meters in which poetry is found. That said, I must openly admit that poetry rarely attracts my attention and I tend to encounter verse more often through drama or narrative (Shakespeare or Chaucer) than by reading short poems. Some of this might have to do with just how concentrated the artistic effect of poetry can be. What I mean is this: in narratives the artistic significance has a great deal more to do with structure and character development whereas in poetry, given the short form we must search for artistic significance in word choice, cadence, and the subtle imagery created by interplay between the two. Poetry is significantly more condensed and as a result open to an unfortunately larger degree of critical license in its interpretation. While some might see this as a point of greater interest in poetry to me I find that it also opens the critical world up for a greater degree of disparity. Besides, I think I just like stories better...

Now, with the above it may seem strange that Emily Dickinson, a poetess who is admittedly generally out of vogue in critical circles, is my absolute favorite. I'm not exactly sure what it is in Dickinson's poetry that strikes a chord with me but it must be a weird and wonderful combination of her simple yet accessible rhyme scheme (she is often maligned for her nursery-style rhyme), profound vocabulary, and her pleasantly macabre style.

The particular poem I've chosen to quote above I first read in high school and even wrote a short bit of accompanying guitar music to perform for a class project. For some reason "There's a Certain Slant of Light"'s depiction of autumn as a prefigured memento-mori reminds the reader of the perpetual presence of death but in a way that has potential for comfort as well as sadness, like the prismatic aspects of church organ music.

Another aspect of Dickinson that, like a bad critic, I can't help but attach to my reading of her poetry. So much of Emily's poetry focuses on death and the potential for human sadness yet it was written by a woman in near seclusion and never intended to be published. in some ways I can't help but wonder how this woman appears to have captured such a profound vision of a nearly universal human experience that may only have touched her to a limited degree. But perhaps this is merely the purest distillation of a human pondering of the ending of life. Perhaps I'm simply morbid and simply find her poetry interesting but in any case I don't mind in the least that hers is the only book of poetry on my shelf (at least the only one that I have ever actively sought).
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Dickison, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1890.