I don't particularly care for nonfiction because the voice rarely holds my interest. But, Annie Dillard pairs past, present, and future paragraphs togethee, whixh keeps both a narrative arc and lyrical impulse. I sometimes tired of her revival of the clouds, but I think the history of the French anthropologist, deformed children, Chinese empires, Judaism, and death all lead up to a cohesive text that is so beautifully apt it can't be sumarized. ( )

This was a deep if thin book — like sunlight dappled on your conscious. Beautiful prose that seems to float in the air. Appreciated the parts set in Tzfat, Israel. ( )

This is the kind of book that makes me grateful I learned how to read.
Annie Dillard has a deeply associative mind. She gathers like as magpie by observing attentively and reading voraciously, then combines her finds in illuminating ways. In this book, she interweaves threads as diverse as birth defects, clouds, sand, Teilhard de Chardin in the Gobi desert, and the Hasidim. Some readers may be confused or put off by the structure, but it worked for me.
One of the many aspects of her writing that I admire is the way that she breaks up dense discussions with asides to the reader. For instance: “Some few wandering Hasids go into exile in order ‘to suffer exile with the Shekinah,’ the presence of God in the world — which is, as you have doubtless noticed, lost or strayed” (p. 129).
That sentence also gets to the heart of what unites the diverse topics of this book: It’s all about a category of inquiry that theologians and philosophers call “theodicy,” which in plain English could be rendered “the justification of God.” You might think that philosophy is remote from our lives, but not this question. It’s implicit in many of the lurid headlines you see while waiting to check out at the market. If God is good, how did [fill in latest tragedy here] happen?
Dillard doesn’t provide a direct answer to this, as if it were something you could fold into your pocket and move on to the next item that stokes your curiosity. Instead, it’s the ground tone, the figured bass, that accompanies any thinking person throughout life as our curiosity takes us from wonder to awe. We are here “for the time being,” as Dillard reminds us in this book’s title and throughout. In her clear-eyed view, this demands we face the horrors of tyrants and natural disaster unflinchingly and at the same time register and respond to the miracle that is life. We are here now, and “there never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less” (p. 88).
A spiritual classic for our time. ( )

swirling tangents

or

aphorisms, adages, and epigrams. ( )

Humankind's long trek. The philosophical observations of Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The wonder of our existence. What -- if any -- role does God play in our lives; or does God just play? This book is a loose tapestry with threads none-too-difficult to follow through. Enjoy it for Annie Dillard's tone, for her gift of observation, and share in her curiosity. ( )