For the Time Being (11 page)

At the sink in the maternity ward, nurse Pat Eisberg is unwrapping another package. This infant emerged into the world three weeks early; she is lavender, and goopy with yellow vernix, like a Channel swimmer. As the washcloth rubs her, she pinks up. I cannot read her name. She is alert and silent. She looks about with apparent concentration; she pays great attention, and seems to have a raw drive to think.

She fixes on my eyes and, through them, studies me. I am not sure I can withstand such scrutiny, but I can, because she is just looking, purely looking, as if she were inspecting this world from a new angle. She is, perhaps for the first time, looking into eyes, but serenely, as if she does not mind whose eyes she meets. What does it matter, after all? It is life that glistens in her eyes; it is a calm consciousness that connects with volts the ocular nerves and working brain. She has a self, and she knows it; the red baby knew it too.

This alert baby’s intensity appears hieratic; it recalls the extraordinary nature of this Formica room. Repetition is powerless before ecstasy, Martin Buber said. Now the newborn is studying the nurse—conferring, it seems, her consciousness upon the busy nurse as a general blessing. I want to walk around this aware baby in circles, as if she were the silver star’s hole on the cave floor, or the Kaaba stone in
Mecca, the wellspring of mystery itself, the black mute stone that requires men to ask, Why is there something here, instead of nothing? And why are we aware of this question—we people, particles going around and around this black stone? Why are we aware of it?

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 open 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.