For the Time Being

Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Dillard searches for answers in a powerful array of images. For the Time Being evokes the terrifying grandeur of all that remains troublingly beyond our understanding.

Donna Seaman

A spare yet exquisitely wrought narrative...by turns funny, flinty, and sublime...Dillard meshes the historical, the scientific, the theological, and the personal in a valiant effort to net life's paradoxes and wonders. —Booklist

Annie Dillard is the author of ten other books, including The Living, a novel; An American Childhood, a memoir; and Teaching a Stone to Talk, a collection of essays the Boston Globe judged one of the best books of the 1980s.