The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Read online

  On the whole, I do not find Christians outside of the catacombs sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense or the waking god may draw us out to whence we can never return.

  The eighteenth-century Hasidic Jews had more sense, and more belief. One Hasidic slaughterer, whose work required invoking the Lord, bade a tearful farewell to his wife and children each morning before he set out for the slaughterhouse. He felt, every morning, that he might never see any of them again. For every day, as he stood with his knife in his hand, the words of his prayer carried him into danger. Once he called on God, God could so easily destroy him after all, before he had time to utter the words, “Have mercy.”

  Another Hasid, a rabbi, refused to promise a friend to visit him the next day: “How can you ask me to make such a promise? This evening I must pray and recite ‘Hear, O Israel.’ When I say these words, my soul goes out to the utmost rim of life. . . . Perhaps I shall not die this time either, but how can I now promise to do something at a time after the prayer?”

  ASSORTED WILDLIFE

  Insects

  I like insects for their stupidity. A paper wasp—Polistes—is fumbling at the stained-glass window on my right. I saw the same sight in the same spot last Sunday: Pssst! Idiot! Sweetheart! Go around by the door! I hope we seem as endearingly stupid to God—bumbling down into lamps, running half-wit across the floor, banging for days at the hinge of an opened door. I hope so. It does not seem likely.

  Penguins

  Antarctic penguins, according to visitors, are . . . adorable. They are tame! They are funny! Tourists in Antarctica are mostly women of a certain age. They step from the cruise ship’s rubber Zodiacs wearing bright ship’s-issue parkas; they stalk around on the gravel and squint into the ice glare; they exclaim over the penguins, whom they find tame, funny, and adorable; they take snapshots of one another with the penguins, and look around cheerfully for something else to look around at.

  The penguins are adorable, and the wasp at the stained-glass window is adorable, because in each case their impersonations of human dignity so evidently fail. What are the chances that God finds our own failed impersonation of human dignity adorable? Or is he fooled? What odds do you give me?

  III

  THE LAND

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO I visited the high Arctic and saw it: the Arctic Ocean, the Beaufort Sea. The place was Barter Island, inside the Arctic Circle, in the Alaskan Arctic north of the North Slope. I stood on the island’s ocean shore and saw what there was to see: a pile of colorless stripes. Through binoculars I could see a bigger pile of colorless stripes.

  It seemed reasonable to call the colorless stripe overhead “sky,” and reasonable to call the colorless stripe at my feet “ice,” for I could see where it began. I could distinguish, that is, my shoes and the black gravel shore and the nearby frozen ice the wind had smashed ashore. It was this mess of ice—ice breccia, pressure ridges, and standing floes, ice sheets upright, tilted, frozen together and jammed—that extended out to the horizon. No matter how hard I blinked, I could not put a name to any of the other stripes. Which was the horizon? Was I seeing land, or water, or their reflections in low clouds? Was I seeing the famous “water sky,” the “frost smoke,” or the “ice blink”?

  In his old age, James McNeill Whistler used to walk down to the Atlantic shore carrying his paints. Day after day, he painted broad, blurred washes representing sky, water, and shore, three blurry light-filled stripes. These are late Whistlers; I like them very much, and in the high Arctic I thought of them, for I seemed to be standing in one of them. If I loosed my eyes from my shoes, the gravel at my feet, or the chaos of ice at the shore, I saw what newborn babies must see: nothing but senseless variations of light. The world was a color-field painting wrapped round me at an unknown distance. I hesitated to take a step.

  There was, in short, no recognizable three-dimensional space in the Arctic. There was also no time. The sun never set, but neither did it appear. The dim round-the-clock light changed haphazardly when the lid of cloud thickened or thinned. Circumstances made the eating of meals random and even impossible. I slept when I was tired. When I woke I walked out into the colorless stripes and the revolving winds, where atmosphere mingled with distance, and where land, ice, and light blurred into a dreamy, freezing vapor that, lacking anything else to do with the stuff, I breathed. Now and then a white bird materialized out of the vapor and screamed. It was, in short, what one might, searching for words, call beautiful land; it was more beautiful still when the sky cleared and the ice shone in the dark water.

  THE TECHNOLOGY

  It is for the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility I search and have been searching in the mountains and along the seacoasts for years. The aim of this expedition is, as Pope Gregory put it in his time, “To attain to somewhat of the unencompassed light, by stealth, and scantily.” How often have I mounted this same expedition, has my absurd barque set out, half-caulked, for the Pole?

  THE LAND

  “These incidents are true,” I read in an 1880 British history of Arctic exploration. “These incidents are true—the storm, the drifting ice-raft, the falling berg, the sinking ship, the breaking up of the great frozen floe: these scenes are real—the vast plains of ice, the ridged hummocks, the bird-thronged cliff, the far-stretching glacier.”

  Polar exploration is no longer the fashion it was during the time of the Franklin expedition, when beachgoers at Brighton thronged to panoramas of Arctic wastes painted in shop windows, and when many thousands of Londoners jammed the Vauxhall pleasure gardens to see a diorama of polar seas. Our attention is elsewhere now, but the light-soaked land still exists: I have seen it.

  THE TECHNOLOGY

  In the nineteenth century, a man deduced Antarctica.

  During that time, no one on earth knew for certain whether there was any austral land mass at all, although the American Charles Wilkes claimed to have seen it. Some geographers and explorers speculated that there was no land, only a frozen Antarctic Ocean; others posited two large islands in the vicinity of the Pole. That there is a South Polar continent was not in fact settled until 1935.

  In 1893, one John Murray presented to the Royal Geographic Society a deduction of the Antarctic continent. His expedition’s ship, the Challenger, had never come within sight of any such continent. His deduction proceeded entirely from dredgings and soundings. In his presentation he posited a large, single continent, a speculative map of which he furnished. He described accurately the unknown continent’s topology: its central plateau with its permanent high-pressure system, its enormous glacier facing the Southern Ocean, its volcanic ranges at one coast, and at another coast, its lowland ranges and hills. He was correct.

  Deduction, then, is possible. There are many techniques for the exploration of high latitudes. There is, for example, such a thing as a drift expedition.

  When a pair of yellow oilskin breeches belonging to the lost crew of the Jeannette turned up after three years in Greenland, having been lost north of central Russia, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen took note. On the basis of these breeches’ travels he plotted the probable direction of the current in the polar basin. Then he mounted a drift expedition: In 1893 he drove his ship, the Fram, deliberately into the pack ice and settled in to wait while the current moved north and, he hoped, across the Pole. For almost two years, he and a crew of twelve lived aboard ship as the frozen ocean carried them. “I long to return to life,” Nansen wrote in his diary, “. . . the years are passing here. . . . Oh! At times this inactivity crushes one’s very soul; one
’s life seems as dark as the winter night outside; there is sunlight upon no other part of it except the past and the far, far distant future. I feel as if I must break through this deadness.”

  The current did not carry them over the Pole, so Nansen and one companion set out one spring with dog sledges and kayaks to reach the Pole on foot. Conditions were too rough on the ice, however, so after reaching a record north latitude, the two turned south toward land, wintering together finally in a stone hut on Franz Josef Land and living on polar bear meat. The following spring, after almost three years, they returned to civilization.

  Nansen’s was the first of several drift expeditions. During World War I, members of a Canadian Arctic expedition, camping on an ice floe seven miles by fifteen miles, drifted in the Beaufort Sea over four hundred miles in the course of six months. In 1937, an airplane deposited a Soviet drift expedition on an ice floe near the North Pole. These four Soviet scientists drifted for nine months while their floe, colliding with grounded ice, repeatedly split into ever-smaller pieces.

  THE LAND

  I have, I say, set out again.

  The days tumble with meanings. The corners heap up with poetry; whole unfilled systems litter the ice.

  THE TECHNOLOGY

  A certain Lieutenant Maxwell, a member of Vitus Bering’s second polar expedition, wrote, “You never feel safe when you have to navigate in waters which are completely blank.”

  Cartographers call blank spaces on a map “sleeping beauties.”

  On our charts I see the symbol for shoals and beside it the letters “P.D.” My neighbor in the pew, a lug with a mustache who has experience of navigational charts and who knows how to take a celestial fix, tells me that the initials stand for “Position Doubtful.”

  THE LAND

  To learn the precise location of a Pole, once you’re near one, choose a clear, dark night to begin. Locate by ordinary navigation the Pole’s position within an area of several square yards. Then arrange on the ice in that area a series of loaded cameras. Aim the cameras at the sky’s zenith; leave their shutters open. Develop the film. The film from that camera located precisely at the Pole will show the night’s revolving stars as perfectly circular concentric rings.

  THE TECHNOLOGY

  I have a taste for solitude, and silence, and for what Plotinus called “the flight of the alone to the Alone.” I have a taste for solitude. Sir John Franklin had, apparently, a taste for backgammon. Is either of these appropriate to conditions?

  You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.

  THE LAND

  I have put on silence and waiting. I have quit my ship and set out on foot over the polar ice. I carry chronometer and sextant, tent, stove and fuel, meat and fat. For water I melt the pack ice in hatchet-hacked chips; frozen salt water is fresh. I sleep when I can walk no longer. I walk on a compass bearing toward geographical north.

  I walk in emptiness; I hear my breath. I see in my hand a compass, see the ice so wide it arcs, see the planet’s peak curving and its low atmosphere held fast on the dive. The years are passing here. I am walking, light as any handful of aurora; I am light as sails, a pile of colorless stripes; I cry “heaven and earth are indistinguishable!” and the current underfoot carries me and I walk.

  The blizzard is like a curtain; I enter it. The blown snow heaps in my eyes. There is nothing to see or to know. For weeks I wait in the tent, adrift and emptied, while the storm unwinds. One day it is over, and I pick up my tent and walk. The storm has scoured the air; the clouds have lifted. The sun rolls round the sky like a fish in a round bowl, like a pebble rolled in a tub, like a swimmer, or a melody flung and repeating, repeating enormously overhead on all sides.

  My name is Silence. Silence is my bivouac, and my supper sipped from bowls. I robe myself each morning in loose strings of stones. My eyes are stones; a chip from the pack ice fills my mouth. My skull is a polar basin; my brain pan grows glaciers, and icebergs, and grease ice, and floes. The years are passing here.

  Far ahead is open water. I do not know what season it is, know how long I have walked into the silence like a tunnel widening before me, into the horizon’s spread arms that widen like seas. I walk to the pack ice edge, to the rim which calves its floes into the black and green water; I stand at the edge and look ahead. As far as I can see, a scurf of candle ice on the water’s skin scratches the sea and crumbles whenever a lump of ice or snow floats through it. The floes are thick in the water, some of them large as land. By my side is passing a flat pan of floe from which someone extends an oar. I hold the oar’s blade, jump, and land on the long floe.

  No one speaks. Here, at the bow of the floe, the bright clowns have staked themselves to the ice. With tent stakes and ropes they have lashed their wrists and ankles to the floe on which they lie stretched and silent, faceup. Among the clowns, and similarly staked, are many boys and girls, some women, and a few men from various countries. One of the men is Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who drifted. One of the women repeatedly opens and closes her fists. One of the clowns has opened his neck ruffle, exposing his skin. For many hours I pass among these staked people, intending to return later and take my place.

  Farther along I see that the tall priest is here, the priest who served grape-juice communion at an ecumenical service many years ago, in another country. He is old. Alone on a wind-streaked patch of snow he kneels, then stands; kneels, then stands; and kneels again. Not far from him, at the floe’s side, sitting on a packing crate, is the deducer John Murray. He lowers a plumb bob overboard and pays out the line. He is wearing the antique fur hat of a Doctor of Reason, such as Erasmus wears in his portrait; it is understood that were he ever to return and present his finding, he would be ridiculed, if only for his hat. Scott’s Captain Oates is here; he has no feet. It is he who stepped outside his tent, to save his friends. Now, on his dignity, he stands and mans the sheet of a square linen sail; he has stepped the wooden mast on a hillock amidships.

  From the floe’s stern I think I hear music; I set out, but it takes me several sleeps to get there. I am no longer using the tent. Each time I wake, I study the floe and the ocean horizon for signs—signs of the pack ice we left behind, of open water, or land, or any sort of weather. But nothing changes; there is only the green sea and the floating ice, and the black sea in the distance, speckled by bergs, and a steady wind astern which smells of unknown mineral salts, some ocean floor.

  At last I reach the floe’s broad stern, its enormous trailing coast, its throngs, its many cooking fires. There are children carrying babies, and men and women painting their skins and trying to catch their reflections in the water to leeward. Near the water’s edge is a wooden upright piano, and a bench with a telephone book on it. A woman is sitting on the telephone book and banging out the Sanctus on the keys. The wind is picking up. I am singing at the top of my lungs, for a lark.

  Many clowns are here; one of them is passing out Girl Scout cookies, all of which are stuck together. Recently, I learn, Sir John Franklin and crew have boarded this floe, and so have the crews of the lost Polaris and the Jeannette. The men, whose antique uniforms are causing envious glances, are hungry. Some of them start roughhousing with the rascally acolyte. One crewman carries the boy on his back along the shore to the piano, where he abandons him for a clump of cookies and a seat on the bench beside the short pianist, whose bare feet, perhaps on account of the telephone book, cannot reach the pedals. She starts playing “The Sound of Music.”

  “You know any Bach?” I say to the lady at the piano, whose legs seem to be highly involved with those of the hungry crew
man; “You know any Mozart? Or maybe ‘How Great Thou Art’?”

  A skeletal officer wearing a black silk neckerchief has located Admiral Peary, recognizable from afar by the curious flag he holds. Peary and the officer together are planning a talent show with skits. When they approach me, I volunteer to sing “Antonio Spangonio, That Bum Toreador” and/or to read a piece of short fiction; they say they will get back to me.

  Christ, under the illusion that we are all penguins, is crouched down posing for snapshots. He crouches, in his robe, between the lead singer of Wildflowers, who is joyfully trying to determine the best angle at which to hold his guitar for the camera, and the farmer’s wife, who keeps her eyes on her painted toenails until the Filipino godfather says “Cheese.” The country-and-western woman, singing, succeeds in pressing a cookie upon the baby Oswaldo. The baby Oswaldo is standing in his lace gown and blue tennis shoes in the center of a circle of explorers, confounding them all.

  In my hand I discover a tambourine. Far ahead, out on the brittle horizon, I see icebergs among the floes. I see tabular bergs and floebergs and dark cracks in the water between them. Low overhead on the underside of the thickening cloud cover are dark colorless stripes reflecting pools of open water in the distance. I am banging on the tambourine, and singing whatever the piano player plays; now it’s “On Top of Old Smokey.” I am banging the tambourine and belting the songs so loudly that people are edging away. But how can any of us tone it down? For we are nearing the Pole.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNIE DILLARD has written twelve books, including in nonfiction For the Time Being, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.