A GOD'S-EYE VIEW.

For the Time Being

Annie Dillard

Knopf, $22, 204 pp.

In 1982, Annie Dillard found herself, as part of a tour group in China, standing above the excavation site of thousands of life-sized clay soldiers, modeled individually on each member of the imperial army and buried twenty-two hundred years ago. "I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth," she writes. "The earth was yielding these bodies...; it grew and bore them. The clay people were earth itself, only shaped. The hazards of time had suspended their bodies in the act of pressing out into the air." Then she reflects: "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."

This is her predominant stance in For the Time Being: looking at human life from high above, as if outside time, yet peering deep into minute details on the surface of the earth and even below, down into layers of past civilizations buried under the dirt. She has worked hard to find images, incidents, and statistics-as well as quotations from other ponderers of life's meaning-that together can convey something of the mystery of the utter uniqueness of each of us individuals and yet our apparently complete dispensability through the grand sweep of time. And she succeeds. I've never read anything, with the exception of parts of the Bible, that gives me more of a sense of how earth and human life on it might look from the viewpoint of God, to whom (in the words of Psalm 90) "a thousand years are as a day" and yet who knows me personally and cares for me "through and through" (Psalm 139).

Of the other great ponderers that Dillard draws on, her favorites are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Kabbalistic-Hasidic thinkers, especially the Baal Shem Tov. She loves Teilhard because he had his hands in the dirt. His famous Phenomenon of Man she dismisses as "crackpot"; for her, he is first and foremost "the paleontologist," discoverer of the Pleistocene Age Homo erectus, Peking Man. From Teilhard's archeological field notes, Dillard appreciatively reproduces comments like "More than three thousand years before our era, people were living there who played with dice like our own." Precisely because Teilhard was so immersed in matter, he could eventually say, "Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within." That is, he came-from a very different direction-to a vision close to the Baal Shem Tov's: that in every bit of God's creation is hidden a "holy spark."

For the Time Being intermixes these materials with a range of other kinds: observations of particular clouds (forms that, eerily resembling humans, take shape over the earth for an instant, then dissipate forever); Dillard's own travel notes from visits to China and Israel, the places that ground (so to speak) Teilhard and the Kabbalists; jolting statistics she has dug up (like "a hundred million of us are children who live on the streets...two thousand of us a day commit suicide"); and more. All these bits and pieces are for Dillard the material through which she keeps pushing her basic questions of who we are, why we are here, and how God figures in it all. She is as much the archeologist as Teilhard, uncovering fragments of meaning and putting them together to puzzle out what we humans are doing during our history on this earth.

The careful way Dillard chooses, juxtaposes, and re-arranges her fragments proves her a master of the currently fashionable "mosaic" essay form that she used with such success, on a smaller scale, in her widely read "An Expedition to the Pole" in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982). Redeeming the fragment-unit created when modernism (and then commercial TV) chopped up the world of integrated meaning, For the Time Being can be seen as one of the culminating literary works of its era. It does for its period what Middlemarch, say, did for the Victorians: take the period's characteristic prose form (the multi-volume novel in George Eliot's case) and craft it to dramatize compellingly the age's best wisdom. The intricate complexities of For the Time Being's structure (the poetic interplay of themes and images, grouped in chapters totaling the symbolic number seven) are more than I can detail here; dissertations to come will be explicating them, for Dillard's stature in American letters is approaching that of her precursor poet- essayist-transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson. I can imagine literary history, down the road, naming her the chief of a movement called Neo-Transcendentalism.

Perhaps her one structural mistake in For the Time Being was to open with a description of a pair of bird-headed dwarfs, drawn from a human birth-defects manual. For her book's integrity, it's a perfect choice: Dillard's hallmark has always been finding just the right image to shock us into truly visualizing her theme, in this case the very definition of being human. But some readers are so appalled by the image that they can't go on, or else they forge ahead under the mistaken impression that Dillard's purpose is to rail against God for creating such horrors.

An additional stumbling block, for those readers who are nonbelievers, is that God is quite calmly and frankly a given of Dillard's meditative probings throughout the book. (The New York Times Book Review, oddly, assigned the book to a self-identified "atheist," who could make no sense of it and so misread almost everything about its tone and meaning.) Dillard is sure, with Psalm 24, that the earth and its fullness are God's. What she's less sure of, and interrogates from ever-new angles, is whether natural and moral evils (a deadly tidal wave, say, or the ancient Romans' cruel flaying of an elderly rabbi) are therefore God's doing, and where precisely human action should come in. How are we to live, she asks (and answers) in a hundred eye-opening ways: How do we help release the sparks of the holy in our brief time here?

"Teach us to know the shortness of our life, to number our days aright," Psalm 90 begs of God, "that we may gain wisdom of heart." The latest text we've been given to learn from-a gift of wisdom for our own time-is For the Time Being.

Peggy Rosenthal has, most recently, co-edited the anthology Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (Oxford).