For the Time Being (14 page)

In other words, the Baal Shem Tov, who was not a theologian, believed that God caused evil events—both moral (the Jew-killing Poles) and natural (the epidemic)—to teach or punish. The Baal Shem Tov learned much about God, but
theodicy was not his bailiwick, and he did not shed the old fatal-to-reason belief that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent.

In 1976 an earthquake in Tangshan killed 750,000 people. Before it quaked, many survivors reported, the earth shone with an incandescent light.

The Talmud obliges people to bless evil events, griefs, and catastrophes with a special benediction—“Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE TRUE JUDGE”—for God performs all. Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil. I the LORD do all these things.”

Similarly, if a pious man sees an amputee, or anyone whom misfortune has harmed since birth, he utters the same blessing, ending with “THE TRUE JUDGE.” These words vivify a view common enough in the first century, and extant and thriving among troubled theists everywhere: that God the puppeteer controls all events and fates, and morally. He rewards us or afflicts us as he judges. He blames the victim.

If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, Who could stand? Who could stand?

Certainly not the amputee. For what did God judge him? For getting his leg infected, dummkopf.

No. It does not wash.

NOW
      
       “Your fathers did eat manna and are dead,” Jesus told people—one of his cruelest remarks. Trafficking directly with the divine, as the manna-eating wilderness generation did, and as Jesus did, confers no immunity to death or hazard. You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.

Our generations rise and break like foam on shores. Yet death, at least in the West, apparently astonishes and blind-sides every man-bubble of us, every time. “One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war,” says Ernest Becker, is that “each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.”

People burst like foam. If you walk a graveyard in the heat of summer, I have read, you can sometimes hear—right through coffins—bloated bellies pop. Poor people everywhere still test a fresh corpse for life by holding a flame to its big toe. If the corpse is truly dead, gas fills the toe blister and explodes it. If the body is alive, fluid, not gas, fills the blister; the fluid boils, and also pops the skin.

We are only about three hundred generations from ten thousand years ago.

“Although we are here today, tomorrow cannot be guaranteed. Keep this in mind! Keep this in mind!” —Twelfth-century Korean Buddhist master Chinul.

Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature—but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract “humanity” whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as a whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds
build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?

We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we’re a lousy snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave. What marvels shall these future whizzes, damn their eyes, accomplish?

B I R T H
      
       Last week on this hospital maternity ward, an obstetrician caught a newborn’s pretty head, and then the rest of him: He had gill slits in his neck, like a shark’s gill slits, and a long tail. The tail was thick at the top, like a kangaroo’s, but naked, of course, possessing human and endearing thin skin. Nurse Pat Eisberg tells me the attending pediatrician had to pry and untuck this tail, which curled between the baby’s legs, to learn its gender. She is whispering to me in a corridor. How is the baby now? How is the family? She looks at me. She raises her thin eyebrows, and turns away; she punches in a computer code that opens a door, and waves goodbye.

Commenting on just such births in
The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker says they are “not publicized,” that “a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane.”

Here is a puzzler from Teilhard: “The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God.” That people, alone of all beings, possess souls is crucial to Teilhard’s thought. Crucial also is the incandescence of matter—its filling the universe to the exclusion of all spirit and spirits, and its blazing from within. Still: What does this sentence mean?

S A N D
      
       Earth sifts over things. 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 the 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 eleven thousand feet, you can see on the flank 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, which bore it downstream.

New York City’s street level rises every century. The rate at which dirt buries us varies. 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, 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 two thousand 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 go blowing 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 the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts.

We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take,” says Bodanis. Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, 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 white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred microfragments from tropical forest fires.” These sorts of things can add up.

At dusk the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil. (Many inches of new topsoil, however, have washed into the ocean.)

We live on dead people’s heads. Scratching under a suburb of St. Louis, archaeologists recently found thirteen settlements, one on top of the other, some of which lasted longer than St. Louis has. Excavating the Combe Grenal cave in France, paleontologists found sixty different layers of human occupation.

The pleasantly lazy people of Bronze Age Troy cooperated with the burial process. Instead of sweeping garbage and litter
from their floors, they brought in dirt to cover the mess and tramped it down. Soon they stooped in their rooms, so they heightened their doors and roofs for another round. Invaders, too, if they win, tend to build new floors on roofs they ruined. By the nineteenth century, archaeologists had to dig through twenty-four feet of earth to find the monuments of the Roman Forum.

A hundred and thirty years ago, when Heinrich Schliemann was digging at a site he hoped was Troy, he excavated a trench sixteen feet deep before he found worked stones. He had found the top of a wall twenty feet high. Under that wall’s foundation, he learned over years of digging, was another high wall, and—oops—another, and another. Archaeologists are still excavating Troy.

Elsewhere, the ziggurats of the ancient Near East sank into the ground rather than having dirt pile upon them; they settled into soft soils and decomposed. “Every few years, the priests would have them built up a few steps higher to compensate for the sinking of the bottom story into the soil.” Earthworm tunnels lower buildings, too, as Darwin noticed. These days the heavy Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is sinking, according to the cathedral’s recent writer-in-residence William Bryant Logan, who wrote the excellent book
Dirt
. The cathedral’s base “is now beneath the water table,” and “a living spring” has arisen in its crypt.