This is a book made up of fragments of history and philosophy, random facts about sand and clouds, and fractured narratives. But it is more than that, too, as Annie Dillard takes these broken elements and tries to weave them together. (You could think of it as a literary version of the Tibetan sand mandala).

She takes on a bevy of big topics: life and death, impermanence and eternity, individuality in the midst of billions, and whether God is responsible for calamity. There are no easy answers to these questions and although she does slip in a few of her own opinions here and there I felt at the end like I had just read through a bizarre and fascinating collection of pages which held some significant observations in the midst of a certain percentage of excess cruft. But I couldn't easily distill the significant from the cruft.

For a sampling, I'll quote a few lines that I marked as I was reading, for one reason or another:

"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself -- in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love -- and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."

"Living things from hyenas to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling props between scenes."

"God is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men...than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires...
"Nature works out its complexities. God suffers the world's necessities along with us, and suffers our turning away, and joins us in exile. Christians might add that Christ hangs, as it were, on the cross forever, always incarnate, and always nailed."

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