As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, I often create fictitious characters that I represent as real people in order to demonstrate points. That is the basic principle of fiction, so I don't feel bad about it, even when the people are real, like my friend Alli, but the scenarios are fabricated. With regards to the conversation I might have with the Alli of my personal lore, I believe it would go a little something like this:

Alli: "She needs to take some prozac, and stop worrying so much about dirt, and dead people. Birth defects I can understand, because that is sad, but the rest of it just doesn't seem like its worth obsessing over. Or at least not for 200 pages."

The real Alli will indubitably be upset with me about this when I send her this link, which I fully intend to do, but let me set her straight really quickly.

I think, even though I am only a few chapters into For the Time Being, I am looking forward to a more complete analysis of the relationship between the formation of sand and the dead men buried 'neath it. There is an obvious "circle of life" correlation here, not just because people are made into mulch by worms, and feed plants, and other Lion King things, but more along the lines of Hamlet. Hamlet offers the idea that the fish eat the worms that have eaten us, and then that the fisherman eats the fish etc, which offers the ligament to the sea, the ancestral birthplace that the Lion King leaves out of its circle of life.

Sea sand is formed by the pulverized remnants of dead corrals, tiny crustaceans, silica, bits of our own broken bottles, quartz, and igneous rock. In other words, it is a hodgepodge of death sticking between our toes. Sand is its own fossil record on the beach, while its neighbor to the north, desert sand, is covering up the fossil record of beast and man in Shaanxi province, a perversion of the memorializing effect of beach sand. Man then sculpted and baked this perversion into its own fossil record, the Terracotta Army, not likely understanding the irony in memorializing their dead within the element of this grim version of the circle of life that itself mocks the "life" part of the circle. In a way there is no way to divorce any one element of this circle from another, and so Dillard herself cannot omit any of it from her book. Birth defects come into play only when one realizes that the books which catalog them are also a fossil record of their own sort.

To dwell on any of these subjects is essentially to dwell on all of them. And that, Alli, is why Annie Dillard has written a very bleak book on what I deem to be just another version of the circle of life, though a much more cynical version.

We may now look at this with relation to Vico's Idea of the circle of ages: the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, and the iron age. Perhaps more aptly we could describe them thus: The age of the gods, The age of the Hero, The age of man, and the age of Chaos.

Dillard seems to be suggesting that this cycle, a well established literary principle, is a charade, and holds no bearing in reality. In other words, her idea of man is completely remote from that of the Odyssey, which, if I may paraphrase, states that men are rarely as good as their fathers were, and almost never better. In other words, she sees the obvious nostalgic component to this view, and dismisses it as just that, nostalgia, a disease where ideas of the past as more Edenic have contorted our ideas of the present. If this is true, it would be a sad revelation. I use the term revelation ironically here because the Book of Revelation is the one where the apocalypse eschews in the era of chaos before the return to the age of the gods, which according to Dillard's hypothesis, will never happen. I suppose if Dillard is right, our revels now are ended.

Speaking of (or rather alluding to) The Tempest (in what is seemingly becoming a mild fit of referential mania) We see the scenario of the apocalypse being more true to its root definition, the lifting of a veil. The uncovering, in this case of what appeared to be magical, but what is in fact just a large production. "Our revels now are ended" says Prospero:

 "These our actors, 

As I foretold you, were all spirits and 
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep."

Now that seems like an Annie Dillard apocalypse. The idea that our little life is rounded by a sleep, and then encased in sand, and means nothing after this. We are run over with the plows of our progeny, which is not 

really that bad of a thing. William Blake even proposes is as a Proverb of Hell (which is a satire, not his true sentiment toward all of these proverbs) to "Run your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead." This 

says enough for me. 

And with that I give a big "So there!" To my phantom Alli.