For the Time Being was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999 and is Dillard’s most structurally ambitious work — a book-length meditation organized not as narrative or argument but as a musical composition: seven themes (Birth, Sand, China, Clouds, Numbers, Israel, Encounters with Chinese Christianity, Thinker [Teilhard de Chardin]) recurring in ten chapters, each iteration deepening and complicating what came before. The result is a work about theodicy — the problem of evil in a world supposedly created by a good God — that refuses to resolve itself into easy answers.
The Book
The recurring themes interweave:
Birth — descriptions of birth defects, of damaged children, of the randomness and violence of embryonic development. Dillard catalogs human deformities not for shock but as data: this is what creation actually looks like.
Sand — meditations on geological time, on the sand that accumulates grain by grain and buries civilizations. Sand as a figure for the incomprehensible scale of time and matter.
China — Dillard’s observations from a trip to China, combined with reflections on Chinese history (the Qin emperor’s terracotta army, the mass deaths of Chinese history).
Numbers — statistics of birth and death, the incomprehensibility of large numbers, the question of whether individual suffering has meaning when multiplied by billions.
Teilhard de Chardin — the Jesuit paleontologist who attempted to reconcile evolution with Christianity, whose optimistic vision of the universe evolving toward an “Omega Point” provides the book’s most hopeful thread.
Method
The structure is deliberately disorienting — Dillard refuses the comfort of narrative progression or argumentative resolution. The reader must hold multiple threads simultaneously and allow meaning to emerge from juxtaposition rather than explication. This is the ideogrammic method that Pound proposed for poetry, applied to theological meditation.
The book’s central question — where is God when babies are born with half a brain? — receives no answer. Or rather, it receives multiple partial answers that do not cohere: Teilhard’s optimism, the rabbis’ lament, the cloud’s indifference, the sand’s patience.
Collecting For the Time Being
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- Alfred A. Knopf imprint
- “First Edition” with number line
- 205 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $40–$100. Large first printing.
Signed copies: $150–$300.
The book is Dillard’s most intellectually demanding work and her most divisive — some readers find it her masterpiece; others find its refusal of coherence frustrating. It is essential for anyone tracing the development of her thought from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek through Holy the Firm to its fullest expression.