For the Time Being
Annie Dillard
Knopf, $22, 204 pp.
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. "I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth," she writes. "The earth was yielding these bodies...; it grew and bore them. The clay people were earth itself, only ...