For the Time Being
Dillard, Annie
A GOD'S-EYE VIEW Peggy Rosenthal 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...
...I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth," she writes...
...The earth was yielding these bodies...
...I seemed long dead and looking down...
...The hazards of time had suspended their bodies in the act of pressing out into the air...
...The day people were earth itself, only shaped...
...I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity...
...Who would not weep from shock...
...This is her predominant stance in For the Time Being: looking at human life from Commonweal 18 September 10,1999...
...A GOD'S-EYE VIEW Peggy Rosenthal 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...
...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...
...it grew and bore them...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 15
