For the Time Being Quotes

“We live in all we seek.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time-- or even knew selflessness or courage or literature-- but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China.
To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000.
See? Nothing to it.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“There is no less holiness at this time- as you are reading this- than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree…. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise.” “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness…through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting.

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...

Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“The Mahabharata says, “Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?

That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“What use is material science as a philosophy or world view if it cannot explain our intelligence and our consciousness?”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“What to do? There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views. Each impels an individual soul to undertake to divinize, transform, and complete the world, to—as these thinkers say quite as if there were both matter and spirit—“subject a little more matter to spirit,” to “lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned,” to “establish in this our place a dwelling place of the Divine Presence,” to “work for the redemption of the world.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“At the Sea of Galilee,I saw a man splitting wood. He was a distant figure in silhouette across the water and I heard a wrong ring. He raised his maul and it clanged at the top of the rise. I heard it ring just as its head hit the sky, and in silence, it hit the wood. Absorbed on the ground, skilled and sure, the stick figure was clobbering the heavens.

I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir. You have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? Your maul and your wedge? Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky—crack it at one blow, split it at the next—and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT’S with the bird-headed dwarfs?”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“There, at the top of the stairs, was the world: acres and miles of open land, an arc of the planet, curving off and lighted in the distance under the morning sky. The building we had just passed through was, it turned out, only the entrance to an open dig, where Chinese archaeologists were in the years-long process of excavating a buried army of life-sized clay soldiers.

I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth. Straight trenches cut the bare soil into deep corridors or long pits. From the trench walls emerged an elbow here, a leg and foot there, a head and neck. Everything was the same color, the terra-cotta earth and the people: the color of plant pots.

Seeing the broad earth under the open sky, and a patch of it sliced into deep corridors from which bodies emerge, surprises many people to tears. Who would not weep from shock? I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity. I seemed long dead and looking down.

For it is in our lifetimes alone that people can witness the unearthing of the deep-dwelling army of Emperor Qin—the seven thousand or the ten thousand soldiers, their real crossbows and swords, their horses and chariots, bared to the light for the first time in 2,200 years.

“In the pictures of the old masters,” Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, “people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“At all times use whatever means expedient to preserve the power of concentration, as if you were taking care of a baby. So advised Chan Buddhist master Cijiao of Chengdu, in eleventh-century China.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

“In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs-- sure, we know this. But do not the dead generations seem to us dark and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii?

We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out. You and I will likely die of heart disease. In most other times, hunger or bacteria would have killed us before our hearts quit. More people have died at fishing, I read once, than at any other human activity including war. Now life expectancy for Britons is 76 years, for Italians 78 years, for people living in China 68 years, for Costa Ricans 75 years, for Danes 77 years, for Kenyans 55 years, and so forth. Americans live about 79 years. We sleep through 28 of them, and are awake for the other 51. How deeply have you cut into your life expectancy? I am playing 52 pick-up on my knees, trying to find the weeks in a year.

We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short term replacement case for a long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds move? Living things from hyenas to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling props between scenes.

To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

“In World War 1, he had survived thirty months at the front; he rescued the wounded-- it was his job-- under heavy bombardment. A witness remembered his "rough-hewn face that Greco had prefigured" and his "total lack of ecclesiasticism." One of the officers serving with him wrote, "Two features of his personality struck you immediately: "courage and humility"." His regiment's Tunisian sharpshooters, who were Muslims, used to say rather cryptically that a "spiritual structure" protected him when he plucked bodies from the ground in crossfire. In battle, he rejoiced in his anonymity and in the front's exhilaration. Precious few men left the Battle of Ypres with a beating heart, let alone a full stomach, let alone exhilaration:

"Nobody except those who were there will ever have the wonder-laden memory that a man can retain of the plain of Ypres in April 1915, when the air of Flanders stank of chlorine and the shells were tearing down the poplars along l'Yperle Canal-- or again, of the charred hillsides of Souville, in July 1916, when they held the odor of death... Those more than human hours impregnate life with a clinging, ineradicable flavor of exaltation and initiation, as though they had been transferred into the absolute." The "clinging, ineradicable flavor"* was perhaps mud-- the mud of Ypres in which two hundred thousand British and Commonwealth men died, ninety thousands of them lost in the actual mud.

Action he loved. His ever increasing belief that God calls people to build and divinize the world, to aid God in redemption, charged every living moment with meaning-- precisely why the battlefield gripped him. "The man at the front is... only secondarily his own self. First and foremost, he is part of a prow cleaving the waves." He dared title an essay "Nostalgia for the Front": "All the enchantments of the East, all the spiritual warmth of Paris, are not worth the mud of Douaumont... How heart-rending it is to find oneself so seldom with a task to be accomplished, one to which the soul feels that it can commit itself unreservedly!"

When he entered the war, he was already a priest. One dawn in 1918, camped in a forest in the Oise with his Zouave regiment, he had neither bread nor wine to offer at Mass. He had an idea, however, and he wrote it down.

Five years later, he sat on a camp stool inside a tent by the Ordos desert cliffs west of Peking. He reworked his old wartime idea on paper. What God's priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that one day's development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering. These the priest could raise and offer.

In China again, four years later, he rode a pony north in the Mongolian grasslands and traced Quaternary strata. Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Mass upon the altar of the world, "to divinize the new day": "Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

“As much as anyone, I imagine," he went on, "I live in the shadows of faith" - that is, in doubt. Doubt and dedication often go hand in hand. And "faith," crucially, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in conscious and rededicated relationship to God. Nevertheless, the temptation to profess creeds with uncrossed fingers is strong.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God's omnipotence. As Baron von Hugel noted, Aquinas said that "the Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power to effect any imaginable thing, but only to effect what is within the nature of things.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term replacement cast for a long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds move?”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“When one of his Hasids complained of God’s hiddenness, Rabbi Pinhas said, “It ceases to be a hiding, if you know it is hiding.” But it does not cease to hide, not ever, not under any circumstance, for anyone.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious—the people, events, and things of the day—to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves.

He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“People whose parents were perhaps illiterate read strangers’ eyes—you can watch them read yours—and learn what they need to know. It does not take long. They understand that grand coincidence brings us together, upright and within earshot, in this flickering generation of human life on this durable planet—common language or not, sale or no sale—and therefore to mark the occasion we might as well have a little cigarette.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints.

They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago—

More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked: it was a rainy day.

We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. “A remote ancestor,” Leakey said, “experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God’s omnipotence.

Again, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.” When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadoran Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the shore of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too.

Maybe “all your actions show your wisdom and love” means that the precious few things we know that God did, and does, are in fact unambiguous in wisdom and love, and all other events derive not from God but only from blind chance, just as they seem to.

What, then, of the bird-headed dwarfs? It need not craze us, I think, to know we are evolving, like other living forms, according to physical processes. Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers—

That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays