For the Time Being

<b>NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</i> and one of the most compelling writers of our time comes a "beautifully written and delightfully strange" (<i>Daily News) </i>narrative that renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest—and often darkest—corners.<br></b><br><i>For the Time Being</i> is Annie Dillard's most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard asks: Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Dillard searches for answers in a powerful array of images: pictures of bird-headed dwarfs in the standard reference of human birth defects; ten thousand terra-cotta figures fashioned for a Chinese emperor in place of the human court that might have followed him into death; the paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin crossing the Gobi Desert; the dizzying variety of clouds. Vivid, eloquent, haunting, <i>For the Time Being </i>evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.<br><br>"Beautifully written and delightfully strange...as earthy as it is sublime...in the truest sense, an eye-opener." —<i>Daily News</i><br><br><br>"Stimulating, humbling, original. [Dillard] illuminate[s] the human perspective of the world, past, present and future, and the individual's relatively inconsequential but ever so unique place in it." —<i>Rocky Mountain News</i><br><i> </i>