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.
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