For the Time Being (21 page)

Then they left, possibly convicted by their consciences, starting with the eldest and ending with the youngest. “And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus lifted up himself, he saw none but the woman.” He sent her on her way.

I saw a barefoot woman drawing a bare tree: she wore a blue scarf and drew in sand with a eucalyptus branch. I saw a Palestinian child duck behind his camel’s legs and pee his name in the sand. (Arabic script lends itself, at least comparatively, to this feat.) Under the camel a runnel moved over the dust like an adder. Later, the child, whose name was Esau, asked me for a cigarette and, failing that, for my lighter. What would he do with a lighter? He would make coffee. He liked coffee? “Yes,” Esau said. “I am Bedu boy!”

One of the best stories of the early Christian desert hermits goes like this: “Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence: and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: Now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?”

C H I N A
      
       Early spring, 1930: Father Teilhard, wearing his clerical collar, was having afternoon tea in the Peking courtyard garden of his new friend, an American woman, Lucile Swan. He sat erect and relaxed on a bamboo chair at a rattan table, laughing and talking. We have a snapshot. In the other bamboo chair Lucile Swan turned his way: she looked mightily amused. A headband held her short, curly hair from her firm and wide-boned face. She wore an open parka and pants: it was perhaps chilly for taking tea outdoors. Her small dog, white and brown, sat at her knee watching the merriment, all ears.

He was forty-nine; she was forty, a sculptor, divorced. It was over a year after the Peking man discovery: he was living in a village near the Zhoukoudian cave and coming into Peking once a week. The two had met at a dinner party. They liked each other at once: “For the first time in years I felt young and full of hope again,” she recalled. She had attended Episcopal boarding school and the Art Institute of Chicago. In Peking, she made portrait sculptures in clay and bronze, and groups of semi-abstract figures: throughout her life she exhibited widely. Soon the two established a daily routine in Peking: They walked, took tea at five, and he returned across
the city to the Jesuit house at six. Those first several years, they laughed a great deal—about, among many other things, the American comic “The Little King,” which Lucile found in her
New Yorkers
and translated for him. Their laughter’s sound carried over courtyard walls.

“Lucile was fine-featured, amply bosomed,” a friend who joined them at tea recalled, “beloved by all who knew her. For she glowed with warmth and honest sentiment.” And Father Teilhard was “a lean, patrician priest… the jagged aristocrat. He radiated outward, gravely, merrily, inquiringly. And always with a delicate consideration for the other and no concern for self.”

June, 1930: “Our blue tents are pitched at the edge of a fossil-bearing cliff looking out over the immense flat surface of Mongolia,” he wrote. “We work in solitude.” He knew he could not post this letter for several months, for he was tracing the wild bounds of Outer Mongolia. “Cut off from any correspondence, I feel that my Paris hopes are dormant.” He was not yet writing letters to Lucile Swan. In the Gobi Desert—the “immense austere plains”—he lost a cigarette lighter. These things happen.

He had interrupted his Zhoukoudian caves excavation to join an American expedition: the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews expedition, officially called the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. Most
of his past five years he had already spent traveling with mules to dig the great Gobi marches; the Roy Chapman Andrews expedition would take him even farther afield. To fix Peking man in context, he wanted to discover the geologic history of the Quaternary through all of Asia. And in fact, over the expedition’s wild and crawling journey, which lasted most of a year, he found the evidence to link and date Chinese and Mongolian strata.

The Andrews expedition was a step up for the
monsieur
accustomed to mules. They drove Dodge trucks. Strings of camels carried gas. Digging, they encountered between five and ten poisonous brown pit vipers every day. The vipers kept them alert, one team member reported; characteristically, Teilhard never mentioned them in his letters. He liked Roy Chapman Andrews, who made his name finding dinosaur eggs. “A wonderful talker,” he described him, and a hunter who, when the team lacked food, drove off into the bright expanses and returned “with a couple of gazelles on the running boards.” Teilhard’s own vitality still battened on apparent paradox. The man who said that his thirty months on the front in the war had made him “very mystical and very realistic” now wrote from his blue tent in Mongolia that “rain, storms and dust and icy winds have only whipped up my blood and brought me rest.” They called the place Wolf Camp, for wolves and eagles hunted there.

“Purity does not lie in a separation from the universe,” he wrote, “but in a deeper penetration of it.”

The next year he attached himself to a rough French expedition as its geologist. The 1931
Croisière Jaune
expedition took nine months and crossed Asia to the Russian frontier. He doubled his knowledge of Asia. He went so far west that he realized one day he was halfway from Peking to Paris. He and the other Frenchmen traveled by Citroën caterpillar across “great folds of impassable land.” They breached what the paleontologist admired as the unending corrugations of the Gobi peneplain and the monumental formations of Upper Asia. They crossed a region where mountains rose twenty-one thousand feet. The silk road’s northern route took them west to the Pamir Mountains as far as Afghanistan. On the road, the others reported, the paleontologist often stopped his Citroën half-track, darted ahead into the waste, and picked up a chipped green rock, a paleolith, or a knob of bone.

“This vast ocean-like expanse, furrowed by sharp ridges of rock, inhabited by gazelles, dotted with white and red lamaseries … I am obliged to understand it.” He examined the juncture where the foot of “the huge ridge of the Celestial Mountains” plunged six hundred feet below sea level into the Turfan Deep. The Turfan Deep, in turn, opened onto a “vast depression” in which the River Tarim lost itself “in the shifting basin of the Lop-Nor.”

“I still, you see, don’t know where life is taking me,” he wrote his friend Max Bégouën. “I’m beginning to think that I shall always be like this and that death will find me still a wanderer.” He was correct about his life and his death.

Frithjof Shuon condensed the thought of the Gnostic Marco Pallis thus: “It is always man who is absent, not grace.” Nations, institutions, and most people dislike real religion, which is why they sometimes persecute its adherents, for the world everywhere prizes what Marcus Borg pinpoints as “achievement, affluence, and appearance,” and strong souls, they say, try to sidestep just these things as snares.

Returning midwinter, the
Croisière Jaune
team explored an immense section of the Gobi no one had mapped. The temperature stuck between −20 and −30 degrees C. They dared not let the caterpillars’ engines stop. Twice a day they halted and stood, almost immobile in furs, by the mess vehicle, and tried to drink boiling soup in tin mugs before it froze.

C L O U D S
      
       On July 2, 1975, the
Baltimore News-American
reported that on the previous day “a cloud of sand blown thousands of miles westward from the Sahara Desert covered most of the Caribbean with a haze. José Colón,
director of the U.S. Weather Service for the Caribbean, said the cloud was the densest in years and could hang over the Caribbean for days.”

On July 30, 1981, painter Jacqueline Gourevitch drew in graphite seven clouds above Middletown, Connecticut. The largest cloud tumbled out of rank. Dark and rucked at one end like a sleeve, it seemed to violate airspace, to sprawl across layers of atmosphere like a thing loosed.

N U M B E R S
      
       Since sand and dirt pile up on everything, why does it look fresh for each new crowd? As natural and human debris raises the continents, vegetation grows on the piles. It is all a stage set—we know this—a temporary stage on top of many layers of stages, but every year fungus, bacteria, and termites carry off the old layer, and every year a new crop of sand, grass, and tree leaves freshens the set and perfects the illusion that ours is the new and urgent world now. When Keats was in Rome, he saw pomegranate trees overhead; they bloomed in dirt blown onto the Colosseum’s broken walls. How can we doubt our own time, in which each bright instant probes the future? We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.

In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs—sure, we know this. But do not the dead generations seem to us dark and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii?

We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out. You and I will likely die of heart disease. In most other times, hunger or bacteria would have killed us before our hearts quit. More people have died at fishing, I read once, than at any other human activity including war. Now life expectancy for Britons is 76 years, for Italians 78 years, for people living in China 68 years, for Costa Ricans 75 years, for Danes 77 years, for Kenyans 55 years, for Israelis 78 years, and so forth. Americans live about 79 years. We sleep through 28 of them, and are awake for the other 51. How deeply have you cut into your life expectancy? I am playing 52 pick-up on my knees, trying to find the weeks in a year.

We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are
Homo sapiens
generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest
Homo
species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term replacement cast for a long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds
move? Living things from hyenas to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling props between scenes.