FOR THE TIME BEING. By Annie DiIIard. Knopf. 205 pp. $22

Author of the Pulitzer-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Dillard muses on those expanses of space and time that, in John Updike's words, "conspire to crush the humans." Drawing on Eastern and Western thought, the intricacies of the natural world, and the beliefs of 18th-century rabbi Baal Shem Tov and French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, she contemplates the insignificance of an individual life when weighed against the age of the universe and "the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity."

Dillard probes our perceptions, misperceptions, and blind spots. Why, she wonders, does she find it easy to fire up moral urgency over a girl lost in a Connecticut forest, but difficult even to comprehend the death of 138,000 Bengalis in a flood (her daughter suggests "lots and lots of clots, in blue water")? "Individuals blur," Dillard writes. "Journalists use the term 'compassion fatigue.' What Ernst Becker called the denial of death is a kind of reality fatigue."

"Excavating the Combe Grenal cave in France, paleontologists found 60 different levels of human occupation." Disquieting as it may be to contemplate a faraway future in which we will be just one more layer, Dillard takes some reassurance from the faraway past. Today's gloomsayers, pronouncing civilization's imminent decline, have a great many forbears. "Already in the first century thinkers thought the world was shot to hell." And Augustine, looking back on the apostles, lamented, "Those were last days then; how much more so now!"

--Paul Feigenbaum