Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being

Though Annie Dillard isn’t exactly a travel writer in the traditional sense, I included a profile on her in Vagabonding because her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is such a subtle, quirky examination of spirituality and planet earth. Recently, en route from Bangkok to Paris, I picked up a copy of Dillard’s newest work, For the Time Being, and I was pleased to discover that it had this same quirky spiritual vibe.

Unlike Pilgrim, which is written from one spot in Virginia, For the Time Being is not rooted to a single place. Instead, Dillard lets her observations wander — from the terra cotta warriors of Xian, to the global workings of sand, to Hasidic philosophy, to seemingly random statistical minutiae. But Dillard uses statistics to fascinating effect, sometimes throwing in a string of loosely related facts to underscore some spiritual point. “One tenth of the land on earth is tundra,” she writes. “At any time it is raining on only three percent of the planet’s surface. Lightning strikes the planet about one hundred times every second. For every one of use living people, including every newborn at the moment it appears, there are roughly one thousand pounds of living termites. Our chickens outnumber us four to one.”

Reading passages like this, one recalls her memorable quip from Pilgrim: “I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress people even slightly. I’m horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a glitt’ring eye and say “Did you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are 288 separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine.”

And Dillard means to change our lives with her trivia machine (or at least change our ways of thinking) by offering up a bit of perspective for an ego-obsessed world. “Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on earth run from 70 billion to over 100 billion,” she writes. “The dead will always outnumber the living. Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. 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 seem foolishly self-important to use, and overexcited.”

In this way, For the Time Being encourages us to think about the bigger questions of life on planet earth, without forcing those questions into readymade religious baggage. As Dillard says, “I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.”

I’ll be quoting For the Time Being in my Travel Quote of the Day all this week.