"For the Time Being"

In this volumn, Annie Dillard's musings about God and the world is more explicit than the previous "Teaching a Stone to Talk". Reading about geology always leaves me on such shaky ground existentially, but 'what interests us most: What are we doing here?' isn't a question I usually care to ask.

• According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
• what a French paleontologist called “the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars”
• 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.
• Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.
• We people possess records, like gravestones, of individual clouds and the dates on which they flourished.
• Maria Constable died that November. We still have these dated clouds.
• prayer of eighteen benedictions. That number, meaning “life” in Hebrew, corresponds to the eighteen vertebrae we bend when we pray.
• Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.
• How I love Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest memory! “As I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.”
• a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”
• Even now China needed this particular land for food so badly that at another underground army site, across the river, farmers had refilled the dug pits and sowed wheat on them; after they harvested the wheat, they would let archaeologists return for a while.
• There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.
• Why seek dated clouds? Why save a letter, take a snapshot, write a memoir, carve a tombstone?
• Its author was Ermette Pierotti, an Italian archaeologist, whom Shalev characterizes only as “poet, architect, and orphan.”
• thirty days for mourning…. Beyond that God says, “Don’t be more merciful than I am.”
• 46. Don’t write in a book, “This book belongs to …” Just write your name, omitting “This book belongs to
• Many of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, and overexcited.
• The spark of goodness within things, the Gnostic-like spark that even the most evil tendency encloses, lends evil its being.
• Absorbed on the ground, skilled and sure, the stick figure (farmers) was clobbering the heavens.
• Again, chiefs in Fiji used to force captives to stand in the postholes of houses—to hold up the houses.
• Cynthia Ozick points out, is to “befog” evil’s specificity.
• What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of “the individual”?
• When you shell peas, you notice that defective germ plasm shrivels one pea in almost every pod. I ain’t so pretty myself.
• “The still explosions on the rocks/the lichens grow in gray, concentric shocks,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop.