Journal Response to Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being

 

For The Time Being, by Annie Dillard, is a non-fictional narrative book. The book is separated into seven chapters. Inside the seven chapters are ten sections entitled; "Birth," "Sand," " China ," "Clouds," "Numbers," " Israel ," "Thinker," "Evil," and "Now." It's like having a book of seventy chapters, instead of seven. These ten topics are looped in the same order every chapter and tell a different story each time. The book is loaded with information. I had sections that were my favorites, and couldn't wait to get to another section of it. My favorites were "Birth," "Numbers," and "Evil."

"Birth" had a lot of information about human birth defects. The book begins with learning about bird-headed dwarves. The bird-headed dwarves become an image that is seen several times throughout. We learn that the child appears normal in the manual for human birth defects, until you realize the scale. A six year old's back is the size of a deck of cards, the face is the size of a thumb, and the child is unable to straighten their limbs. This is all really sad but then you realize they are mentally deficient and will never realize that they are any different than anyone else. Then we learn of other deformed children - children that are born with leopard spots, that look like leprechauns, that have whistling-faces, mermaid children, and children with short legs. The little girl with the short legs was the one I felt the most moved by. This three year old little girl looks very happy. She is smiling and thinking that she is the cutest thing in the world. It turns out she has femoral hypoplasia. She cannot straighten her elbows and her feet stick directly out of her loins and diaper, looking very short and different. We learn next that no plastic surgery can help her and that her intelligence is normal. She is happy right now, but then she is compared to a little boy who is older and with the same condition. This little boy doesn't look happy at all. He knows he is different and knows the cruelty of the people around us. It's almost better to have the bird-headed dwarf deficiency because at least then you would never have the mental capacity to know that there was anything wrong.

It was in the "numbers" section of the same chapter that we hear the quote, "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic" from Joseph Stalin. A tidal wave killed 138 000 people in Bangladesh in 1991, and the thought of a deformed child is almost more moving. Why is it that when we hear of a single death, and the harsh details of it, that we feel extremely bad? Then when we hear of "a million deaths" it doesn't have as big of an impact. It would seem logical that we would be a million times more emotional but it doesn't work like that. This wave isn't the first time that a wave is mentioned in the book. In 1896, a wave killed 27 000 people in northeast Japan . Although there are a lot of different stories and information talked about throughout, a few things are repeated. The wave is one, the bird-headed dwarves are another, and Teilhard de Chardin is a man talked of in several sections. Teilhard is heard of when exploring the Chinese deserts (the " China " section), in the "Cloud" section, in the "Thinker" section, and also in the "Sand" section. He may have been talked of in others but those are the ones I remember. He is quoted many times, but I don't think I have quite grasped his importance to the book.

I don't think I have ever learned so much different information from one book. It is all unrelated topics, but they teach you so many things. Some of the facts are unimportant like; did you know that more people have died from fishing than any other human activity including war? But because the facts are unimportant, it makes them even more interesting. I would love to know what made Dillard think of writing a book like this. I have never seen any other book like it.
Sadly, it was the two cruel sections that had my attention the most. It must be the "fascination of the abomination." I enjoyed learning about the poor children who would never be the same as anyone else, who would grow up deformed and have to deal with the cruel eyes of others. I also loved learning of the "Evil." I know it's awful, but people having their skin scraped off with oyster shells, then the shells "quivering," being thrown into a fire, really keeps my attention. How could I forget when Emperor Qin buried the Confucians up to their heads (alive) just so that he could cut their heads off? It also keeps my attention when I learn of a girl that had been murdered in the woods. Even more so when I learn that another girl is missing in the same woods. I'm not a horrible person though, because I was relieved when they found the girl alive.

 
In this book the question of whether there is a God is asked. What kind of God allows for extreme bad and good to exist in the same world? It says in the book, "How can evil exist in a world created by God, the Beneficent One? It can exist, because entrapped deep inside the force of evil there is a spark of goodness..." by Rabbi Yehuda. God and religion is the focus throughout the book, I'd say. Dillard questions all of his actions.  It says in the book that we hold in our hands, our world and life. One courageous man, who lived in a mountain tribe and had never seen the outside world, took his life into his hands. He strapped himself to the bottom of James Taylor's plane in the 1930s. He explained to his loved ones that he had to see where it had come from.  Dillard asks, "If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?" (167) She realizes that she doesn't know beans about God. The time she spends on thinking about God and these questions is "a reasonable way to pass one's life" though.

Dillard's book really made me think. I liked her writing style, it was a style I had never seen before. If someone asked me if I thought that writing a book on so many different subjects would work, I would answer, "No."  Dillard somehow manages to loop these topics around so that they all made sense within the context of the book. Although some of the sections, such as " China ," and " Israel ," didn't interest me as much as the others, I still was made aware of many interesting things. Just like the review on the back of the book said, "It's the kind of book that can be carried around for months, to be used as digest, oracle, guide book..." (-Books in Canada ) I don't think I will use it as an oracle or guide book, but I do think I want to get a copy of it so that I can read the sections over again. The topics were so interesting, and because they were arranged in short easy pieces to read, I could go back and take a quick look at them at any point. I've been talking about this book to a lot of people because I thought that it was so different. Now everyone at work wants to read it.