For the Time Being (18 page)

Foiled, the emperor concluded that a court enemy must be jinxing his immortality project. He purged the court and concealed his movements. He owned 270 palaces; now he built secret tunnels, routes, and walkways among them; he crept about under heavy guard. He killed informers and all their families. Once, a meteorite fell in a far-flung area of his empire. A local wag whose sense of occasion was poor wrote on the meteorite the witty taunt, “After Qin Shih-huang-ti’s death the land will be divided.” Emperor Qin easily pounded the stone to powder; it took longer to kill all that region’s inhabitants.

He had already spared some thought for death’s big blank by the time he was thirteen. It was then that he drafted seven hundred thousand men to start building his mausoleum, an underground palace he hoped to illuminate like the colorful earth above, using long-burning whale-oil lamps. Workers dug through three underground streams and carved a wide vault, in which they formed and painted a miniature world. On the ceiling above the emperor’s ready copper coffin, they painted the heavens and set constellations. The Milky Way, the source of the Yellow River, they daubed in dots. From the stars the Yellow River fell. Quicksilver in rivulets mimicked
the Yellow and all the realm’s great rivers; the liquid actually flowed, mechanically, and emptied into a model of the gleaming ocean. Artists built palaces and towers to scale. They rigged automatic crossbows to shoot grave robbers. They pasted jewels over everything.

Many years later, Emperor Qin died. During his funeral, while his pallbearers threaded the maze of the tomb to the hidden sepulchre, soldiers outside sealed the great jade door. They buried the pallbearers alive because they alone (who had possibly lost a civil service lottery) knew a way into the tomb’s depths. They heaped dirt over the whole mausoleum, jade door and all. Then they planted a grassy orchard so the tumulus looked like a hill.

You do not find the dead emperor of China something of a clown, do you, because he liked it here and wanted to stay? Because he loved, say, the loam but did not care to join it?

The dying generations, Yeats called the human array, the very large array. We turn faster than disks on a harrow, than blades on a reaper. Time: You can’t chock the wheels. We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, the people is grass. We lay us out in rows; hay rakes gather us in. Chinese peasants sow and reap over the emperor’s tomb—generations of them, those Chinese peasants! I saw them, far away. The plow turns under the Chinese
peasants where they stand in the field like stalks. Any traveler to any land remarks it: They live like that endlessly, over there. Generation after generation of them lives and dies, over there.

Digging last week in the backyard of our house—in the fresh grass at the cutting edge of the present in a changed wind, under that morning’s clouds—a worker and I surprised two toy soldiers eight feet down.

The early Amish in this country used to roll their community’s dead bodies in wraps of sod before they buried them. We are food, like rolled sandwiches, for the Greek god Chronos, time, who eats his children.

Albert Goldbarth: “Let the Earth stir her dead.”

The Scotch-Irish in the Appalachians once buried their dead with a platter of salt on their stomachs, signifying the soul’s immortality. A rich and long-gone people, I read once, buried their dead after lifting their tongues and dropping jewels into the hollows. The reason for this is unknown.

Mao Tse-tung took novocaine injections to prolong life and virility. His wife, the notorious Jiang Qing, similarly took blood transfusions from—according to Mao’s doctor—“healthy young soldiers.” Like Emperor Qin, Mao believed
that the best immortality elixir was the secretion of women’s bodies. The more he dipped into this wellspring, the longer he would live, so he dipped.

As his fears grew, Mao kept moving—within his secret palace and all over the country. When he hopped a train, all traffic on that line halted; his passage fouled rail schedules for a week. Soldiers cleared all the stations, and security guards dressed up to pose as vendors. When Mao slept, the train stopped. He was addicted to barbiturates. He thought someone poisoned one of his swimming pools. He thought someone else poisoned a Nanchang guesthouse where he stayed.

“Jade water,” the Aztecs called human blood. They fed it—hundreds of living sacrifices a day—to the sun. This, the only nourishment the sun god would take, helped him battle the stars. Daily, blood worked its magic: Daily, morning overcame night. The Aztecs likely knew, as the old Chinese knew, the unrelated oddity that dissolving bodies stain jade; jade absorbs bodies’ fluids in rusty, bloody-looking spots.

On the day of the dead, according to Ovid, the Romans sacrificed to a goddess who was mute: Tacitas. She was a fish with its mouth sewn shut.

C L O U D S
      
       One day in January, 1942, just after the United States entered World War II, men and women in Athens saw from the base of the Acropolis an “immense structure of cumulus cloud rising out of the Peloponnese.” To the east lay “an undercloud, floating like a detached lining.” Does it matter to you, or to the world of time, which of the two you feel yourself to resemble, the “immense structure” or the “undercloud”?

“The world is God’s body,” Teilhard said. “God draws it ever upwards.”

How to live? “The only worthwhile joy,” Teilhard wrote in one of his thoughtful, outrageous pronouncements, is “to release some infinitesimal quantity of the absolute, to free one fragment of being, forever.” Living well is “cooperating as one individual atom in the final establishment of a world: and ultimately nothing else can mean anything to me.” Is either—releasing a bit of the absolute, or cooperating to establish a world—preferable, or enough, or too much?

On the northeastern coast of Trinidad, during an afternoon in the 1950s, Archie Carr, the green-turtle biologist, lay
in a hammock and watched “little round wind clouds” over the Caribbean Sea and “towering pearly land clouds” over Tobago.

N U M B E R S
      
       Another dated wave: In northeast Japan, a seismic sea wave killed 27,000 people on June 15, 1896. Do not fail to distinguish this infamous day from April 30, 1991, when typhoon waves drowned 138,000 Bangladeshi.

On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people—likely a short man and woman and child
Australopithecus
—walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago—before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked: it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three’s steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. “A remote ancestor,” Leakey said, “experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a
last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.

After archaeologists studied this long strip of ground for several years, they buried it to save it. Along one preserved portion, however, new tree roots are already cracking the footprints, and in another place winds threaten to sand them flat; the preservers did not cover them deeply enough. Now they are burying them again.

After these three hominids walked in the rain, an interval of decades, centuries, thousands of years, and millions of years passed before Peking man and other
erectus
people lived on earth. That stretch of time lasted eight times longer than the few hundred thousand years between Peking man’s time and ours. Exactly halfway into the interval (1.8 million years ago), recent and controversial dating puts
Homo erectus
in Java.

Jeremiah, walking toward Jerusalem, saw the smoke from the Temple’s blaze. He wept; he saw the blood of the slain. “He put his face close to the ground and saw the footprints of sucklings and infants who were walking into captivity” in Babylon. He kissed the footprints.

Who were these individuals? Who were the three who walked together and left footprints in the rain? Who was the gilled baby—the one with the waggly tail? Who was the Baal
Shem Tov, who taught, danced, and dug clay? He survived among the children of exiles whose footprints on the bare earth Jeremiah kissed. Centuries later, Emperor Hadrian destroyed another such son of exile, Rabbi Akiva, in Rome. Russian Christians and European Christians alike tried to wipe all those survivors of children of exile from the ground of the earth as a man wipes a plate—survivors of exiles whose footprints on the ground we might well kiss, and whose feet.

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others. A newborn slept in a shell of aluminum foil; a Dutchman watched a crab in the desert; a punch-drunk airport skycap joined me for a cigarette. And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?

Which of all these people are still alive? You are alive; that is certain. We living men and women address one another confident that we share membership in the same elite minority club and cohort, the now-living. As I write this I am still alive, but of course I might well have died before you read it. The Dutch traveler has likely not yet died his death, nor the porter. The baked-potato baby is probably not yet pushing up daisies. The one you love?

The Chinese soldiers who breathed air posing for their seven thousand individual clay portraits must have thought it
a wonderful difference, that workers buried only their simulacra then, so their sons could bury their flesh a bit later. One wonders what they did in the months or years they gained. One wonders what one is, oneself, up to these days.

Was it wisdom Mao Tse-tung attained when—like Ted Bundy, who defended himself by pointing out that there are “so many people”—he awakened to the long view?

“China has many people,” Mao told Nehru in 1954. “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of…. The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: He boasted that he was “willing to lose 300 million people”—then, in 1957, half of China’s population.

An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account: it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”

I S R A E L
      
       In St. Anne’s Basilica in Jerusalem, the plain stones magnified hymns in every tongue, all day, every
day. Four people faltering at song sounded like choirs of all the dead souls on earth exalted.