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.
The first Chinese emperor, Emperor Qin, commissioned 8000 clay soldiers, each unique, to be created and buried alongside his corpse rather than interring live soldiers, as was the custom of the day. Fast forward 2000 years and my younger daughter, fascinated by the commercials for the Terracotta Warriors display opening at the Royal Ontario Museum, convinced us to take a trip into the city and see the statues for ourselves. Despite the imagination-sparking of the history of the artefacts, they were, as Dillard predicted, presented in a sterile fashion, behind glass cases, no photography allowed. Happily, however, as the site in China is still being excavated, it would appear that some of the statues can yet be seen "crawling from the walls" of the dig site.
In For The Time Being, Annie Dillard revisits the question that seems to have prompted most of her nonfiction writing: How can an all-powerful God allow suffering? From what I've read, this has haunted Dillard all her life, and although I thought she was satisfied by the answer from C. S. Lewis she quotes in An American Childhood (The sum of human suffering we needn't worry about: There is plenty of suffering, but no one suffers the sum of it), here she quotes Lewis again, along with other philosophers from medieval Rabbis to Teilhard (the Jesuit paleontologist who unearthed Peking Man), still seeking a satisfactory answer. I found the following quote by Dillard, which may explain why this question is her obsession: "Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." For the Time Being seems to be yet another vehicle for Dillard to assemble her research and musings on her private fascinations.
In a rigid structure, each chapter is divided into sections labelled birth-sand-China-clouds-numbers-Israel-encounters-thinker-evil-now. Each section is filled with what seem to be random facts: information on human birth defects; the making of a grain of sand; the nature of clouds as recorded in art through history; paleontology; Kabala and Hasidism; the scale of human tragedy (comparing the loss of the one to the loss of millions, even the billions since the beginning of humanity); and random encounters with people and literature. The case is made that though God might not let the fall of the smallest sparrow escape His notice, we humans are no more important or permanent than the clouds in the sky, the grains of sand on the beach, or the buried clay soldiers.
A couple of interesting quotes:
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.
There might well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on the earth: This is where the people come out.
There were many interesting facts and fine writing in For The Time Being, but did I like this book? Not really. It may have been too idiosyncratic, more vanity project than meant for public consumption, or at any rate, I am not the public meant for its consumption. I have enjoyed discovering and reading Annie Dillard this year and have encountered some dense writing in her books, but this was the first time I found her dull. More than once Dillard includes quotes that she finds confusing:
Here is a puzzler from Teilhard: "The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God." That people, alone of all beings, possess souls is crucial to Teilhard's thought. Crucial also is the incandescence of matter -- its filling the universe to the exclusion of all spirit and spirits, and its blazing from within. Still: What does this sentence mean?
And so I am left not completely understanding Dillard while she includes information that she doesn't completely understand, and ultimately, the layers are too deep for me to excavate. I did, however, appreciate the bits that Dillard includes that speak to the idiosyncratic thoughts to which I advert:
"Without a doubt, time is an accident," Maimonides said, "one of the created accidents, such as blackness and whiteness."
We are food, like rolled sandwiches, for the Greek god Chronos, time, who eats his children.
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.
It's interesting to me that I read this book so soon after Hawking's A Brief History Of Time, in which he states:
According to this theory [strong anthropic principle], there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own initial configuration and, perhaps, with its own set of laws of science. In most of these universes the conditions would not be right for the development of complicated organisms; only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question: "Why is the universe the way we see it?" The answer is then simple: If it had been different, we would not be here!
Perhaps the strong anthropic principle applies also to God: Suffering is allowed on small and large scales because only those who are capable of suffering have the intelligence to ask the question, "Why?"
