"For the Time Being"—Study Guide of Important Quotations

FOR THE TIME BEING BY ANNIE DILLARD STUDY GUIDE

IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS Allen Loibner-Waitkus

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 1

CHAPTER ONE “And friendly and pleasant, but easily distracted. There is a lot to be said for children who are friendly and pleasant. And you—are you easily distracted yourself, these days?” (3). “If you gave birth to two bird-headed dwarfs, as these children’s mother did—a boy and a girl—you could carry them both everywhere, all their lives, in your arms or in a basket, and they would never leave you, not even to go to college” (3). “Will this peculiar baby live? What do you hope?” (3). “Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone” (8). “What were we doing, our generation, up so high?” (17). “When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, ‘his hands are clenched as though to say, “Everything is mine. I will inherit it all.” When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, “I have acquired nothing from the world”’” (19). “Confucius wept. Confucius, when he understood that he would soon die, wept” (19). “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’” (20). “(Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: ‘The principal danger of man is religion.’)” (27). “God punishes the good, he [Rabbi Akiva] proposed, in this short life, for their few sins, and rewards them eternally in the world to come. Similarly, God rewards the evil-doers in this short life for their few good deeds, and punishes them eternally in the world to come. I do not know how that sat with people. It is, like every ingenious, God-fearing explanation of natural calamity, harsh all around” (30). “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” (30). “The blue light of the television flickers on the cave wall. If the fellow crawls out of the cave, what does he see? Not the sun itself, but night, and the two thousand visible stars. Once, I tried to converse with him, the fellow who crawled out of his blue-lit cave to the real world. He had looked into this matter of God. He had to shout to make himself heard: ‘How do you stand the wind out here?’ [...] I don’t. Not for long. I drive a schoolkids’ car pool. I shouted back, ‘I don’t! I read For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 2

Consumer Reports every month!’ It seemed unlikely that he heard. The wind blew into his face. He turned and faced the lee. I don’t know how long he stayed out. A little at a time does for me—a little every day” (32-33).

CHAPTER TWO “On December 1, 1931, Anna MacRae came to life. How many centuries would you have to live before this, and thousands of incidents like it every day, ceased to astound you?” (36). “There might as well be a rough angel guarding this [obstetrical] ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes the boats on rocks. There might as 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 earth: This is where the people come out” (36). “There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply it by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it” (47). “Digging through layers of books yields dated clouds and near clouds. Why seek dated clouds? Why save a letter, take a snapshot, write a memoir, carve a tombstone?” (47). “Augustine said to a group of people, ‘We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God’” (47).

living.

“In his last will and testament, Rabbi Yehudah Hechasid, a Kabbalist and ethicist of the twelfth century, left numbered precepts for sensible and holy 15. Don’t weep excessively for a deceased person. There are three days for weeping, seven days for eulogizing, thirty days for mourning…. Beyond that God says, ‘Don’t be more merciful than I am.’ 45. Don’t cut down a fruit-bearing tree. 46. Don’t write in a book, ‘This book belongs to …’ Just write your name, omitting ‘This book belongs to …’” (48).

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 3

“‘The dead outnumber the living,” Harvard’s Nathan Keyfitz wrote in a 1991 letter to Justin Kaplan. ‘Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on earth run from 70 billion to over 100 billion.’ Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us (by now we have swelled to 5.9 billion) by about 14 to 1. None of these figures is certain, and Keyfitz wrote that the ratio ‘could be as high as 20 to 1.’ 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 well seem foolishly self-important to us, and overexcited.” (49) “In Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Paramo, a dead woman says to her dead son, ‘Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time’” (50). “Quizzical encounters cumulate over a lifetime. Possibly when our brains fire their dying charges we will remember and see, to our dismay, not any bestloved face but instead some solitary figure, a stranger, whose image the mind retains” (53). “One morning I walked from a kibbutz to the edge of the Sea of Galilee. On the shore beyond me I saw a man splitting wood. He was a distant figure in silhouette across the water. I heard a wrong ring. He raised his maul and it clanged at the top of its rise. He drove it down. I could see the wood divide and drop in silence. The figure bent, straightened, raised the maul with both arms, and again I heard it ring just as its head knocked the sky. Metal banged metal as a clapper bangs its bell. Then the figure brought down the maul in silence. 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 For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 4

inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT’S with the bird-headed dwarfs?” (53). “In his world, people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person” (55). “What does God pray? ‘May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger’” (58). “Shall we contemplate Chinese scholars’ beheadings twenty-three centuries ago? It hurts worse to break a leg” (59). “Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in Thailand? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?” (59). “There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this” (59). “The good times, and the heroic people, are all gone. Everyone knows this. Everyone always has” (60). “In our time, says a twentieth-century Hasidic rabbi, we are in a coma” (62).

CHAPTER THREE “Isn’t this [discussing birth defects] kind of fun, once you get used to it? No” (64). “Our sins have nothing to do with our physical fates. When you shell peas, you notice that defective germ plasm shrivels one pea in almost every pod. I ain’t so pretty myself” (66). “Why is there sand in deserts? Because windblown sand collects in every low place, and deserts are low, like beaches. However far you live from the sea, however high your altitude, you will find sand in ditches, in roadside drains, and in cracks between rocks and sidewalks. “Sand collects in flat places too, like high-altitude deserts. During interglacials, such as the one in which we live now, soils dry. Clay particles clump and lie low; sand grains part and blow about. Winds drop sand by weight, as one drops anything when it gets too heavy for one’s strength. Winds carry light stone dust—loess—far afield. Wherever they drop it, it stays put in only a few places: in the rich prairies in central North America, and in precious flat basins in China and Russia” (68-69). “Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform? I think so” (71).

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 5

“Seventy-four years later, on August 11, 1943, a young woman wrote from Westerbork, a transition camp in the Netherlands: ‘It really doesn’t matter if it is I who die or another. What matters is that we are all marked men’” (72). “These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death” (73). “They say there is a Buddha in each grain of sand. It is this sort of pop wisdom that makes the greatness of Buddhism seem aggravating” (73). “Which of these people might yet be alive? The red baby likely lives, and his testicles have calmed to a normal color. Most of the Chinese peasants I saw working in a field are up and breathing. Maybe the Wanschock granddaughters are riding horses scornfully over the Mongolian plains, but husband and wife are long gone. The others have died, except probably the wood splitter whose maul rang the sky, and the thriving nurse Pat Eisberg. Is it important if the bird-headed dwarfs have died yet, or the statistician? If your father has died his death yet? Your child? It is only a matter of time, after all. Why do we find it supremely pertinent, during any moment of any century on earth, which among us is topside? Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of soil our feet poke?” (74-75)” “‘One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.’ Joseph Stalin, that gourmandizer, gave words to this disquieting and possibly universal sentiment” (75). “How can an individual count? Do individuals count only to us other suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts? Of Allah, the Qur’an says, ‘not so much as the weight of an ant in heaven and earth escapes from him.’ That is touching, that Allah, God, and their ilk care when one ant dismembers another, or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it” (75). “‘Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable,’ Thomas Merton wrote. ‘Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious’” (77). “I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway” (79). “The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps—some humans’ idea of elegance—bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste” (80). For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 6

“I felt like Harry Reasoner at the Great Wall of China in 1972, who, pressed on live coverage for a response, came up with, ‘It’s … uh … it’s one of the two or three darnedest things I ever saw’” (82). “C. S. Lewis once noted— interestingly, salvifically— that the sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. That was a load off my mind. I had found it easier to contemplate the square root of minus one” (84). “Why must we suffer losses? Even Meister Eckhart offers the lame apology that God never intended us to regard his gifts as our property and that ‘in order to impress it on us, he frequently takes away everything, physical and spiritual…. Why does God stress this point so much? Because he wants to be ours exclusively’” (84). “It is ‘fatal,’ Teilhard said of the old belief that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent. It is fatal to reason. It does not work” (84-85). “Similarly, Teilhard called the explanation that God hides himself deliberately to test our love ‘hateful’; it is ‘mental gymnastics’” (85). “Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, ‘All your actions show your wisdom and love.’ Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, ‘That’s a lie!’—just to put things on a solid footing” (85). “Of course, God wrote no scriptures, neither chapter nor verse. It is foolish to blame or quit him for his admirers’ claims, superstitious or otherwise. ‘God is not on trial,’ I read somewhere. ‘We are not jurors but suppliants’” (86). “Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers— so that, as the paleontologist said, ‘at every moment it releases a given quantity of events that cause distress (failures, disintegrations, death).’ That is, evolution’s ‘every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures’” (87). “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, For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 7

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” (88). “There is no less holiness at this time—as you are reading this—than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of God. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said “Maid, arise” to the centurion’s daughter, or the day Peter walked on water, or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. 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 a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture” (88-89).

CHAPTER FOUR “What use is material science as a philosophy or world view if it cannot explain our intelligence and our consciousness?” (93). “If, then, the human layer in which we spend our lives is an epiphenomenon in nature’s mechanical doings, if science devotes scant attention to human culture, and if science has scrutinized human consciousness only recently and leaves other disciplines, if any, to study human thought—then science, which is, God knows, correct, nevertheless cannot address what interests us most: What are we doing here?” (95). “On a shore, eight thousand waves break a day. James Trefil provides these facts. At any one time, the foam from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth’s surface. This acreage of foam—using the figure 4 percent—is equal to that of the entire continent of North America. By another coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population, in other words, although it is the third-largest population among nations, is about as small a portion of the earth’s people as breaking waves’ white foam is to the planet’s surface. And the whole North American continent occupies no more space than waves’ foam” (108). “It took only a few typhoon waves to drown 138,000 Bangladeshi on April 30, 1991. We see generations of waves rise from the sea that made them, billions of individuals at a time; we see them dwindle and vanish back. What will move you to pity?” (109). “The Talmud obliges people to bless evil events, griefs, and catastrophes with a special benediction—’Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE TRUE JUDGE’—for

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 8

God performs all. Isaiah 45:7: ‘I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil. I the LORD do all these things.’’ “Similarly, if a pious man sees an amputee, or anyone whom misfortune has harmed since birth, he utters the same blessing, ending with ‘THE TRUE JUDGE.’ These words vivify a view common enough in the first century, and extant and thriving among troubled theists everywhere: that God the puppeteer controls all events and fates, and morally. He rewards us or afflicts us as he judges. He blames the victim. “If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, Who could stand? Who could stand? Certainly not the amputee. For what did God judge him? For getting his leg infected, dummkopf. “No. It does not wash” (117).

CHAPTER FIVE “Earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground. Then the ground rises over your ankles and up your shins. If the sergeant holds his platoon at attention long enough, he and his ranks will stand upright and buried like the Chinese emperor’s army (122). “There are two kinds of deaths, according to an old saying that Rabbi Pinhas cited. One death is as hard as passing a rope through the ring at the top of the mast, and one death is as easy as drawing a hair from milk” (126). “HEAD-SPINNING NUMBERS CAUSE MIND TO GO SLACK, the Hartford Courant says. But our minds must not go slack. How can we think straight if our minds go slack? We agree that we want to think straight” (130).

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“Sometimes we touch strangers. Sometimes no one speaks. Like clouds we travelers meet and part with members of our cohort, our fellows in the panting caravans of those who are alive while we are. How many strangers have we occasion to hold in our arms?” (135)

CHAPTER SIX “Earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground. Then the ground rises over your ankles and up your shins. If the sergeant holds his platoon at attention long enough, he and his ranks will stand upright and buried like the Chinese emperor’s army (122).

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“An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: ‘Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account: it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other’” (160). “Often in a church I have thought that while there is scant hope for me, I can ask God to strengthen the holiness of all these good people here—that man, that woman, that child … and I do so. In St. Anne’s Basilica it struck me in the middle of a white-robed priest’s French service that possibly everybody in that stone chamber, and possibly everybody in every other house of prayer on earth, thinks this way. What if we are all praying for one another in the hope that the others are holy, when we are not? Of course this must be the case. Then—again possibly—surely it adds up to something or other?” (161). “Do you think I don’t know cigarettes are fatal?” (163). “Then what, if anything, does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?” (167). “I don’t know. I don’t know beans about God” (169).

CHAPTER SEVEN “How many of these offspring—hoopoes, doves, snails, and swallowtails—would develop normally? It is a percentage in the high nineties, normality is. Of course, most offspring get eaten right quick” (179). “Every human being sucks the living strength of God from a different place, said Rabbi Pinhas, and together they make up Man. Perhaps as humans deepen and widen their understanding of God, it takes more people to see the whole of him. Or it could be that there is a universal mind for whom we are all stringers” (191). “On April 14, 1977, at dawn, I saw a cloud in the west from an island in the Pacific Northwest. The cloud looked like a fish fillet. Recently, hundreds of volunteers searched the world’s skies, but they could not find the cloud again” (198). “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” (203).

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For the Time Being by Annie Dillard • Important Quotations Study Guide • Loibner-Waitkus • UA-PTC • PAGE 12