The photo suggests the tone and vast scope of the questions of meaning Dillard addresses. Why are we here? How is it we come into this world "trailing clouds of glory" as newborns, and then are churned under the earth to join the 80 billion or so dead before us? Do individuals matter at all? What's the big difference between life and death? What kind of God allows for beauty and horror to coexist in this world? Is He involved, responsible?

In her note to the reader at the beginning, Dillard writes: "This is a nonfiction first-person narrative, but it is not intimate, and its narratives keep breaking. Its form is unusual, its scenes are remote, its focus wide, and its tone austere. Its pleasures are almost purely mental" (ix).

Dillard then takes a series of disparate subjects and juxtaposes them throughout the book with little in the way of transition. These subjects are the following: stories of Teilhard de Chardin's exploration of the Chinese deserts, Hasidic Jewish thought in Eastern Europe, a history of sand, particular clouds in history, human birth defects, stories from Israel and China, and a few odd encounters with strangers. Dillard explains, "Together they make a complex picture of our world. Does God cause natural calamity? What might be the relationship of the Absolute to a lost schoolgirl in a plaid skirt? Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?" (x).

Dillard dives right into exploring "things as they are" by guiding us through the standard manual of human birth defects. "For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, but for credibility's sake let's start with the bad news" (8). The bad news begins with what becomes a recurring image in the book, the "bird-headed dwarf." The child's picture in the manual at first seems fairly normal, until you realize the scale—a six-year-old's back is the size of a deck of cards, his face about the size of your thumb, his limbs unable to straighten. Page after page shows children horribly deformed: the cri-du-chat (cat's cry) babies who mew like cats, the whistling-face babies whose faces don't quite meet up in the middle, and on and on. Some, like the bird-headed-dwarves, are mentally deficient and will never realize the tragedy of their situation. Other children are not so lucky. Dillard imagines what each individual child's mother might be like, what the children's lives are like, what their story is. And you cannot help but do the same, to ache with grief and worry over the little girl with stubby legs and bent arms, hair combed into little pigtails, who thinks she's the cutest thing going right now but in another year or so will "catch on."

And just as you get involved with one particular child's story, Dillard whipsaws you back in the other direction with overwhelmingly large tragedies, such as the tidal wave that killed 138,000 in Bangladesh in 1991. Do you feel the same level of concern for these people? Or do you find yourself more in agreement with Stalin, who as Dillard notes, said "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic." How can the personal, particular example of one deformed child move you more than the impersonal, numbingly large numbers of drowning victims? Were the drowned not also individuals with hopes, fears, dreams, and loves? By going back and forth between the two extremes of personal and impersonal, you realize the child is utterly tragic, and also utterly insignificant. How can this possibly be? What kind of God allows for any of this?

Besides exploring birth defects, Dillard also records the history of individual clouds at a particular moment in time—their shape, color, size, etc., as noted by artists such as John Muir and John Constable. The notion at first seems absurd. What could be more ephemeral or less significant than the history of a cloud? Then you realize it's no less ridiculous to record your own individual thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Both clouds and you arise and pass away.

As Dillard moves from one apparently unrelated topic to the next, with little in the way of connecting narrative, the effect upon the reader is powerful and unsettling. You keep waiting for the story to emerge, for things to come together and make sense. Instead, tension builds as these little narrative bits bump and chafe against each other like tectonic plates, grinding beneath your surface awareness, stirring up deeper questions. Dillard's style reflects the truth of things, that there is beauty and horror in our lives, paradoxes we try to smooth out by telling ourselves stories to tie things together. In these personal stories, we are the hero, and our concerns, our desires, and our loved ones are all part of a very important drama that makes sense and has a point. Dillard exposes that illusion, and you feel the cold draft of the vastness of time, the vulnerability of being a tiny speck in the universe, the impersonal nature of Truth.

Near the end of her book Dillard writes, "I don't know. I don't know beans about God" (169). But you get the sense that she is like one of her subjects, Teilhard de Chardin, who had, "like many spiritual thinkers, a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox" (147). That the spiritual search, "this feckless prospecting in the dark for the unseen," is "a reasonable way to pass one's life." What else is worth doing? To be sure, it isn't easy:

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