For the Time Being Read online

  What use is material science as a philosophy or world view if it cannot explain our intelligence and our consciousness? Teilhard gave a lot of thought to this question. “I don’t know why,” he wrote disingenuously, “but geologists have considered every concentric layer forming the Earth except one: the layer of human thought.” Since, as he said, “There is no thought but man’s thought,” how could we credit any philosophy that does not make man “the key of the universe?” A generation ago, biologists scorned this view as anthropocentrist. Today some dismiss it as “speciesist.” For are we not evolved? And primates?

  By this reasoning, somewhere around eleven thousand years ago, some clever hunting human primates—who made stone spears, drew pictures, and talked—had another idea. They knocked ripe seeds from transplanted wild barley or einkorn wheat and stored the seeds dry at their campsite in the Zagros Mountains. Since eating ground seeds kept the families alive when hunting failed, they settled there, planted more seed, hunkered down to wait its sprouting, and, what with one thing and another, shucks, here we be, I at my laptop top computer, you with a book in your hands. We are just like squirrels, really, or, well, more like gibbons, but we happen to use tools, speak, and write; we blundered into art and science. We are one of those animals, the ones whose neocortexes swelled, who just happen to write encyclopedias and fly to the moon. Can anyone believe this?

  Yes, because cultural evolution happens fast; it accelerates exponentially and, to put it less precisely, explodes. Biological evolution takes time, because it requires biological generations; the unit of reproduction is the mortal and replicating creature. Once the naked ape starts talking, however, “the unit of reproduction becomes”—in the words of anthropologist Gary Clevidence—“the mouth.” Information and complexity burgeon and replicate so fast that the printing press arrives as almost an afterthought of our 10 billion brain neurons and their 60 trillion connections. Positivist science can, theoretically, account for the whole human show, even our 5.9 billion unique shades of consciousness, and our love for one another and for books.

  Science could, I say, if it possessed all the data, describe the purely physical workings that have enabled our species to build and fly jets, write poems, encode data on silicon, and photograph Jupiter. But science has other fish to fry. Science (like philosophy) has bypassed this vast and abyssal fish of consciousness and culture. The data are tighter in other areas. Still, let us grant that our human world is a quirk of materials. Let us ignore the staggering truth that you hold in your hands an object of culture, one of many your gaze meets all around you. If, then, the human layer in which we spend our lives is an epiphenomenon in nature’s mechanical doings, if science devotes scant attention to human culture, and if science has scrutinized human consciousness only recently and leaves other disciplines, if any, to study human thought—then science, which is, God knows, correct, nevertheless cannot address what interests us most: What are we doing here?

  Teilhard’s own notion, like the Hasids’, moves top-down, and therefore lacks all respectability: No one can account for spirit by matter (hence science’s reasonable stance), but one can indeed account for matter by spirit. Having started from spirit, from God, these and other unpopular thinkers have no real difficulty pinning down, or spinning out, or at least addressing, our role and raison d’être.

  A standard caution forbids teaching Kabbalah to anyone under forty. Recently, an Ashkenazi Orthodox immigrant to Guatemala advised his adult, secular American grandson, “If you want to learn Kabbalah, lock yourself in a room with the Zohar and a pound of cocaine.” This astounded the grandson and infuriated his father, the old immigrant’s son.

  When the high priest enters the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, other men tie a rope to his leg, so that if he dies they can haul him out without going in themselves. So says the Zohar. For when the high priest recites the holy name and the blessing, the divine bends down and smites him.

  Nurse Pat Eisberg, a small young woman, wears big green-and-white jogging shoes; the shoes nearly match in size the alert lavender baby. The baby, firm in the nurse’s hands, turns her bottomless eyes slowly in every direction, as if she is memorizing the nurse, the light, the ceiling, me, and the sink. Pat Eisberg’s fingertips are wrinkling in water. She washes the baby carefully, swaddles her, and slides her down the counter on the right.

  When Krishna’s mother looked inside his mouth, she saw in his throat the night sky filled with all the stars in the cosmos. She saw “the far corners of the sky, and the wind, and lightning, and the orb of the Earth … and she saw her own village and herself.” Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory” refers to newborns; they trail clouds of glory as they come. These immediate newborns—those on the left counter, and those washed ones on the right—are keenly interested. None cries. They look about slowly, moving their eyes. They do not speak, as trees do not speak. They do seem wise, as though they understood that their new world, however strange, was only another shade in a streaming marvel they had known from the beginning.

  The Talmud states that fetuses in the womb study Torah, and learn it by heart. They also see, moments before birth, all the mingled vastness of the universe, and its volumes of time, and its multitudes of peoples trampling the generations under. These unborn children are in a holy state. An angel comes to each one, however, just before he is born, and taps his lips so he forgets all he knows and joins the bewildered human race. “This ‘forgetting’ desanctifies him, of course,” Lis Harris notes, so to “console” him, his “fellow fallible mortals” throw him a party.

  In a few hours, this oracular newborn here in the hospital will lose her alertness. She will open her eyes infrequently. She will be quite obviously unable to focus. Her glee will come later, if she lives, and her love later still. For now, she will sleep and cry and suck and be wonderful enough.

  The nurse wipes her forehead on a sleeve. The lights are hot. She reaches for another one.

  “Now you,” she says.

  S A N D Mycenaean Greeks called the dead “the thirsty,” and their place “the dry country.”

  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. Then, 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 a desert. Wind bangs sand grains into one another on dunes and beaches, and into rocks. Rocks and other sands blast the surfaces, so windblown sands don’t sparkle like young river sands.

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

  Chert, flint, agate, and glassy rock can flake to a cutting edge only a few atoms thick. Prehistoric people made long oval knives of this surpassing sharpness, and made them, wittingly, too fragile to use. Some people—Homo sapiens—lived in a subfreezing open-air camp in central France about eighteen thousand years ago. We call their ambitious culture Solutrean; it lasted only about three thousand years. They invented the bow and arrow, the spear thrower, and the needle—which made clothes such a welcome improvement over draped pelts. (He’s so ambitious—like the husband in “Makin’ Whoopee”—he even sews.)

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

  Hold one of these chert knives to the sky. It passes light. It shines dull, waxy gold—brown in the center, and yellow toward the edges as it clears. At each concoidal fractured edge all the way around the double-ogive form, at each cove in the continental stone, 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 fashion. 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’ breath-holding work at a 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 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 sidewalk cracks can cut your finger. The geologist Philip H. Kuenen, who devoted his working life to sand, reckoned, possibly 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 another like a hand.

  Exposed uplifted sandstone, naturally, can wear away again. A sandstone castle in Austria, nine hundred years old, is itself returning to soil. Weathering has turned its outer walls to 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 out of whack.

  Volunteers in famine lands, and rescue workers who haul people from rubble and wrecks, say that those people who are near death have a distinctive look in their eyes. They call it “circling the drain.”

  A woman of the Roman Empire had a wastrel son—a grown son, intelligent and spirited, who was throwing away his life on the deep misery of idle pleasures. Praying for him, she wept, and according to a contemporary account, “her tears, when streaming down, they watered the ground under her eyes in every place where she prayed.” At that time—the fourth century—people commonly prayed prone on the dirt. She went to the priest and begged him to talk to her son. The priest refused. Just wait, he counseled, and added, “Go thy ways and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.”

  It is, however, entirely possible. The sons of many tears have perished, and will perish.

  Apparently even the priest thought our wishes move God and force his hand. Or did he think God rewards virtue?

  C H I N A Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and a writer 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, and the cranks they attracted, possibly tempted some possessors of good minds to write him off without reading him.

  He took theology courses for four years, 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. 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, his Jesuit brothers, and his friends, and always eager to settle for a life in the United States, he nevertheless discovered gradually that his vow of obedience required 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 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, and returning to France.

  Why did he put up with it? One of his colleagues said he had “the impatience of a prophet.” When did he show impatience? His colleagues and many of his friends urged him to quit the Jesuits. Only for a few weeks, however, did he 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.”

  He had dedicated his life wholeheartedly, again and again; consequently, he did not complain. When he first learned that Rome banned 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 blew off steam, like many a cleric. He wrote a friend, “The sin of Rome 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.

  Of the Osage Indians of the North American plains, John Joseph Mathews wrote, “They have adopted the Man on the Cross, because they understand him. He is both Chaso [sky person] and Hunkah [earth person]. His footprints are on the Peyote altars, and they are deep like the footprints of one who has jumped.”

  Seventh-century Chinese Chan Buddhist master Hongren advised: “Work, work! … Work! Don’t waste a moment…. Calm yourself, quiet yourself, master your senses. Work, work!
Just dress in old clothes, eat simple food…. feign ignorance, appear inarticulate. This is most economical with energy, yet effective.”

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

  C L O U D S On October 25, 1870 (while Schliemann was beginning to excavate Troy), Gerard Manley Hopkins saw clouds in the sky over England. “One great stack in particular over Pendle was knoppled all over in fine snowy tufts and pencilled with bloom-shadow.” Hopkins had begun a three-year study of philosophy in Lancashire as the second part of his Jesuit novitiate. His journal for those years concentrates on daily clouds and, to a lesser extent, trees.

  April 22, 1871: clouds “stepping one behind the other, their edges tossed with bright ravelling.” Hopkins was twenty-seven years old. Who were these individual clouds?

  On June 13 of that year, he saw over Whalley a rack of red clouds floating away. “What you look at hard seems to look at you.” Is this true? Or is it one of the many epigrams that merely sound true? I do not think it is true.

  July, 1871: “The greatest stack of cloud … I ever can recall seeing. It was in two limbs fairly level above and below, like two waggons or loaded trucks. The left was rawly made … like the ringlets of a ram’s fleece blowing.”

  While he was writing this record in his room, he heard “every now and then the deathwatch ticking. It goes for a few seconds at a time.” The deathwatch is only a beetle.