|
A brief history of reality >> For the Time Being is lucid and riveting by JULIET WATERS
I have two copies of this book, one by my computer and one by my bed. I keep them close because things happen to books--fires, floods or sometimes they just fall apart. The hardcover by my computer barely survived a rainy season in Honduras. The paperback by my bed started to unglue a couple of years ago. I keep meaning to buy a third copy. My favourite advice from it has always been to write only for people who read. Dillard argues that books can't compete with the hypnotic spectacle offered by other media and it's a waste of time to even try. "The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that may be. They like or require what books alone have. If they want to see films, they will find films. If they do not like to read they will not. People who read are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books. I can not think of a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who don't read in the first place." Given this gentle dismissal of non-readers, the author's note at the beginning of Dillard's latest book For the Time Being may seem odd to long-time fans. "This is a non-fiction first-person narrative, but it is not intimate, and its narratives keep breaking. Its form is unusual, its scenes are remote, its focus wide and its tone austere. Its pleasures are almost purely mental." One reviewer called this note unnecessary and self-defeating. Is she apologizing for writing an intellectual and spiritual inquiry in this brain-dead era? Or is she actually trying to discourage people from reading her? It's not like Dillard needs fans. Since she won the Pulitzer Prize at age 28, in the mid-'80s, for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she's been steadily on track to becoming one of the most important American writers of her generation. And For the Time Being is hardly an arcane, impenetrable book of philosophical complexity. It's short, lucid and riveting. The book grabs you right from its opening paragraphs, which examine the disadvantages and advantages of giving birth to bird-headed dwarves (the down side is that they are usually born with moderate to severe mental deficiency due to a malformed cerebrum; the up side is that they are so tiny that if you gave birth to one, or even two, "you could carry them everywhere, all your lives, in your arms or in a basket, and they would never leave you, not even to go to college.") There are ruminations on the mind-blowing number of humans currently living and dying in the world (Ted Bundy could never understand what all the fuss was about, "I mean there are so many people.") And anecdotes of excruciating evil, spliced with facts from the history of sand, stories about scholars of the Kabbalah ("If you want to learn Kabbalah, lock yourself in a room with the Zohar and a pound of cocaine" suggests one Hasidic rabbi), and episodes from the life of the Catholic priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who discovered the first evidence of Peking man and was exiled from the Church for his writings on evolution. Dillard shoves our faces into reality. Into our insignificance, mortality and tragedy. If anything, For the Time Being is less cerebral and more passionate than her previous works. It's less witty, less controlled and much angrier. Over and over again she tries to answer the question: "Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?" The result of this quest is a book that provides--in heavily concentrated doses--the kind of consciousness that can only be found in books. For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, Viking, hc, 207 pp, $29.99
|
In one of her earlier works, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard claims: "The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses--the imagination's vision, and the imagination's hearing--and the moral sense and the intellect."