The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Read online

  Teilhard found a twentieth-century Mongol family living in the Shara-Osso-Gol canyon. Their name was Wanschock. The father and his five sons helped Teilhard excavate during the weeks he camped. The Wanschocks rode horses, kept goats, and lived in a cave scooped out of a cliff in the loess. They taught their toddlers to ride by mounting them on sheep. “The Mongols wear long hair,” Teilhard wrote, “never take off their boots, are never out of the saddle. The Mongol women look you straight in the eyes with a slightly scornful air, and ride like the men.”

  “Throughout my whole life,” he noted later, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”

  Why is there sand in deserts? Where does it come from? Why is there sand on beaches? I always thought ocean waves made sand on the seashore: Waves pounded continents’ rock and shattered it to stone, gravel, and finally sand. This, I learned, is only slightly true.

  Lichens make more sand than ocean waves do, as do ice salt crystals. On mountaintops and on hillsides you see cracked rock faces and boulders. Lichens grow on them, in rings or tufts, secreting acids that break down the minerals. First the lichens widen cracks in the rock, then growing salt crystals split them further, until finally freezing water shatters them.

  Glaciers make some sand: Their bottoms pluck boulders and stones that scour all the land in their paths. When glaciers melt, they leave behind outwash plains, boulders, rocks, gravels, sand, and clay—which is sand ground down to floury powder. Winds lift the sand and bear it aloft.

  Mostly, the continents’ streams and rivers make sand. Streams, especially, and fast rivers bear bouncing rocks that knock the earth, and break themselves into sharp chips of sand. The sand grains leap—saltate—downstream. This is why the banks and the bottoms of most streams are sandy. Look in any small stream in the woods or mountains, as far inland as you like. That stream is making sand, and sand lies on its bed. Caddis-fly larvae use it as stones for their odd masonry houses.

  Rivers bear sand to the sea. As rivers slow, they drop their sand, and harbors silt up and deltas spread. If the land’s rock is fresh lava, as it is in Tahiti and on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, then the sand the streams bear down to the beaches is black. If the inland rock is basaltic, like the Columbia River plateau’s, the sand the river carries to beaches is dark and fine. If the rock is granite, as it is in the eastern United States, the sand is pale quartz and feldspar.

  When Los Angeles and Orange Counties dammed their intermittent streams, all the beaches from Los Angeles to Newport Beach lost their sand supply. Those weak hillside streams, which had never even flowed year-round, had supplied all that sand. Now beach towns buy up dredged harbor sand to ship and dump on their coasts to make beaches.

  Coastal currents smear sand round the continents’ edges, but except where waves beat cliffs, ocean waves do not make stony sand. Mostly, waves and longshore currents spread river sand coastwise, and waves fling it back at the continents’ feet. Ocean waves crumble dead coral reefs. And parrot fish eat coral polyps. The fish do not digest the corals’ limey bits, but instead defecate them in dribbles, making that white coral sand we prize on tropical beaches. Little or no sand lies under the deep oceans.

  So why is there sand in deserts? Because windblown sand collects in every low place, and deserts are low, like beaches. However far you live from the sea, however high your altitude, you will find sand in ditches, in roadside drains, and in cracks between rocks and sidewalks.

  Sand collects in flat places, too, like high-altitude deserts. During interglacials, such as the one in which we live now, soils dry. Clay particles clump and lie low, while sand grains part and blow about. Winds drop sand by weight, as one drops anything when it gets too heavy for one’s strength. Winds carry light stone dust—loess—far afield, though it stays put in only a few places: in the rich prairies in central North America, and in precious flat basins of China and Russia.

  September 1923: They rode back into Peking. Their mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in sixty wooden crates. Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”

  The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and that spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, “There are only beings, everywhere.”

  Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When he was still in college, he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came after this Ordos trip, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia but also through Java, India, and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?

  “If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”

  Teilhard had glimpsed the Gobi Desert from muleback on his 1923 Ordos expedition. It was the biggest desert on earth: 500,000 square miles of sandstorms and ravaged plateaus in what was then northern Mongolia. “As far as the eye could see around us, over the vast plain which had once been leveled by the Yellow River, waved the grass of the steppes.” The solitudes moved him: the “wide torrential valleys where herds of gazelles could be seen, nose to wind, among the pebbles and the sparse grass. . . . We were crossing the low steppes of San-Tao-Ho. The Mongolians are now no longer here. . . . The season of the yellow winds is over.”

  The next morning, he broke camp by the waters of the Shiling-Gol and moved toward Kalgan in the Gobi, an area science did not know. He found fossils. Two days later, he was wielding a pick at the Dalai-Nor, a wet salt pan twenty-five miles long on the Mongolian steppe. He shook and spread his bedroll on a dune by the shore. Six oxcarts carried supplies and boxes of extinct Tertiary horse and rhino bones.

  In the field Teilhard wore a tough jacket and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. In one breast pocket he carried a breviary, and in the other a pack of Gauloises. “This man with the clear regard,” a friend called him. He was long-boned, sharp-faced, faintly smiling when serious, and merry in company. When he laughed his face split into planes. His friends were mostly geologists, paleontologists, priests, explorers, educated Paris and New York women, and archaeologists. Among them were an odd trio: Julian Huxley, Henry Clay Frick, and Paul Valéry.

  The paleontologist once called God “punctiform”: “It is precisely because he is so infinitely profound and punctiform that God is infinitely near.” Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform? I think so.

  Of the gospel miracles Teilhard wrote, “I feel obliged to admit that I believe not because of but in spite of the miracles.”

  The more nearly spherical is a grain of sand, the older it is. “The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand one hundred miles,” James Trefil tells us. As a sand grain tumbles along the riverbed—as it saltates, then lies still, then saltates for those millions of years—it smooths some of its rough edges. Sooner or later, it blows into a desert. In the desert, no water buoys its weight. When it leaps, it lands hard. In the desert, it knaps itself round. Most of the round sand grains in the world, wherever you find them, have spent some part of their histories blowing around the desert.

  “We live surrounded by ideas and objects infinitely more ancient than we imagine,” Teilhard said, “and yet at the same time everything is in motion.”

  Chert, flint, agate, and glassy rock can flake to a cutting edge just a few atoms thick. Prehistoric pe
ople made long oval knives of this surpassing sharpness, and made them, wittingly, too fragile to use. Those people—Homo sapiens—lived in a subfreezing open-air camp in central France about 18,000 years ago. We call their ambitious culture Solutrean; it lasted only about 3,000 years. It was they who invented the bow and arrow, the spear thrower, and the needle—which made clothes such a welcome improvement over draped pelts.

  Solutrean artisans knapped from rocks astonishing yellow blades in the shape of long, narrow, pointed leaves. Most of these blades are the size and thickness of a fillet of sole. The longest is fourteen inches long, four inches at its beam, and only one-quarter inch thick. Their intricate technique is, according to Douglas Preston, “primarily an intellectual process.” A modern surgeon at Michigan Medical School used such a blade to open a patient’s abdomen; it was smoother, he said, than his best steel scalpels. Another scientist estimated a Solutrean chert blade to be one hundred times sharper than a steel scalpel; its edge split few cells, and left scant scar. An Arizona rancher skinned a bear with an obsidian knife in two hours, he said, instead of the usual three and a half; he never even needed to press down.

  Hold one of these chert knives to the sky. Most of it shines dull, waxy gold—brown in the center, and yellow toward the edges. At each fractured rim, however, the blade thins from translucency to transparency. You see your skin, and the sky. At its very edge the blade dissolves into the universe at large. It ends, imperceptibly, at an atom.

  Each of these delicate, absurd objects takes hundreds of separate blows to make. At each stroke and at each pressure flake, the brittle chert might—and, by the record, very often did—snap. The maker knew he was likely to lose many hours’ of breath-holding work at a single tap. The maker worked in extreme cold. He knew no one would ever use the virtuoso blades. He protected them, and his descendants saved them intact, for their very perfection. To any human on earth, the sight of one of them means: Someone thought of making, and made, this difficult, impossible, beautiful thing.

  New sand is young and sharp. Some of the sand in a sidewalk crack will cut your finger. The geologist Philip H. Kuenen, who devoted his working life to sand, reckoned, perhaps imprecisely, that every second, one billion sharp new sand grains of quartz alone appear on earth, chips off the old continental blocks. Sand has been forming at this clip all along. Only a smattering of that sand ends up on beaches and deserts. So why are we all not buried in dunes? Because sand amasses in basins whose floors subside. Pressure cooks much of it into sandstone, as one crustal plate slides over the next like a hand.

  Exposed uplifted sandstone, naturally, can wear away again. A sandstone castle in Austria, 900 years old, is itself returning to soil. Weathering has turned its outer walls to fine clay from which grass grows.

  Sand grains bang about in deserts and wear down their angles. Kuenen went so far as to determine how much desert the world “needs”—2 × 106 square kilometers—in order, as Sand and Sandstone explained it, “to keep the world average roundness constant (to offset the new, sharp-cornered sand added each year).” So you can easily reason that if erosion and drought fail to form new deserts in Africa, say, at an acceptable pace, thereby starving whole populations, the ratio of the world’s round sand to the world’s sharp sand will get seriously out of whack.

  Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest as well as a paleontologist. The theology and cosmology that drove his thinking and writing are not his strongest legacy, any more than William Butler Yeats’s theology and cosmology are his. He wrote eighteen books. The unhappy prominence of his dull, arcane, and improbably crackpot The Phenomenon of Man thirty years ago, and the occasional nutty enthusiasm of his admirers, some of them vague-brained new-agers, have obscured his intelligent, plausible, and beautiful The Divine Milieu and the short, magnificent literary essays “The Mass of the World” and “The Heart of Matter.” The world rarely can or will distinguish art from mere opinion. Pressed for his opinions, Teilhard produced them, and their peculiarly disagreeable lexicon. The cranks they attracted possibly tempted some possessors of good minds to write him off without reading him.

  In France he had taken years of theology courses, and admitted that he did not find them bien amusants. He studied chemistry and physics in Cairo; at the Sorbonne he worked in botany and zoology as well as geology. His doctorate in geology described mammifers of the Lower Eocene in France.

  He ran afoul of Roman authorities over his thinking. In the 1920s, evolution was still a new current in thought, as the church reckoned, and it had not yet penetrated Rome’s layers of brocade. To the church, the notion of biological evolution seemed to hash the old doctrine of original sin. After Teilhard lectured on evolution in Paris, the church in Rome gagged him. It forbade him to lecture and to publish anything but purely scientific articles. He complied. Of his eighteen books, the church permitted only one to see light in his lifetime, a short scientific monograph published in Peking. The cardinals were pleased to keep his person, also, tucked away. They exiled him to China, the second time for virtually the rest of his life. He was forty-two. Always longing for France, for his Paris teaching position, the Jesuit brothers, and his friends, and always willing to settle for a life in the United States, he nevertheless discovered gradually that his vow of obedience would require him to renounce the West for twenty-two years more.

  Every year, he applied to publish his work; every year, Rome refused. Every year, he applied to return to France; every year, Rome refused. At last Rome let him visit France briefly when he was sixty-five; he had had a heart attack. Still Rome prohibited his publishing. Offered a fine teaching post, he went to Rome in person to seek permission; Rome denied it. He traveled to the United States, to South America, and to Africa, and he visited Paris to spread his ideas by talking. Even when he was seventy-three and dying of heart disease in New York, Rome forbade his publishing, lecturing, or returning to France.

  Why did he put up with it? One of his colleagues said he had “the impatience of a prophet.” When exactly did he show this impatience? His colleagues and many of his friends urged him to quit the Jesuits. Only for a few weeks, however, did he ever consider leaving the order. To kick over the traces, he thought, would betray his Christianity. People would think—perish the thought—he was straying from the church! His brother Jesuits defended him and his thinking. Leaving the order would mean, he decided, “the killing of everything I want to liberate, not destroy.” The Catholic Church, he wrote late in life, is still our best hope for an arch to God, for the transformation of man, and for making, in his view, evolution meaningful: It is “the only international organization that works.”

  Again and again he had dedicated his life wholeheartedly to the church: Consequently, he did not much complain. When he first learned that Rome had blocked publication of The Divine Milieu, he did, however, allow himself to write a friend in private that it was “a pity.” The year before he died, while he was declaring in sincere letters that Rome was mankind’s best hope, he also allowed himself to blow off steam, like many a cleric. “The sin of Rome,” he wrote to a friend, “is not to believe in a future. . . . I know it because I have stifled for fifty years in this sub-human atmosphere.” He apparently felt strongly both ways. Later, Vatican II calmly endorsed most of his ideas.

  “All that is really worthwhile is action,” Teilhard wrote. “Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought.”

  Earth sifts over things as dirt or dust. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground. Then the ground rises over your ankles and up your shins. If the sergeant holds his platoon at attention long enough, he and his ranks will stand upright and buried like a Chinese emperor’s army.

  Micrometeorite dust can bury you, too, if you wait: A ton falls on earth every hour. Or you could pile up with locusts. At Mount Cook in Montana, at 11,000 feet, you can see on the flan
k a dark layer of locusts. The locusts fell or wrecked in 1907, when a swarm flew off course and froze. People noticed the deposit only when a chunk separated from the mountain and fell into a creek that bore it downstream.

  The rate at which dirt buries us varies. New York City’s street level rises every century. The Mexico City in which Cortés walked is now thirty feet underground. It would be farther underground except that Mexico City itself has started sinking. Digging a subway line there, workers found a temple. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. King Herod the Great rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. The famous Western Wall is a top layer of old retaining wall near the peak of Mount Moriah. From the present bottom of the Western Wall to bedrock is sixty feet.

  Quick: Why aren’t you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place but to forestall burial.

  It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy, Oxford writer David Bodanis says, because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently, they snap off easily and blow about. Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folks who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce pollution haze that blurs and dims the world.

  We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take,” says Bodanis. Air routinely carries intimate fragments of run, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as “salt crystals from ocean whitecaps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and carried microfragments from tropical forest fires.” These things can add up.