For the Time Being Part 3

Oh. I laughed at my mistake. Tolerant, he joined the joke.

"I invite you-for drink, only. In lobby." He was smiling. An easygoing fellow. When we parted, weeks later, he gave me an old coin swollen and layered with age, which I prize.

T H I N K E R C. S. Lewis once noted-interestingly, salvifically-that the sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. That was a load off my mind. I had found it easier to contemplate the square root of minus one.

Why must we suffer losses? Even Meister Eckhart offers the lame apology that G.o.d never intended us to regard his gifts as our property and that "in order to impress it on us, he frequently takes away everything, physical and spiritual.... Why does G.o.d stress this point so much? Because he wants to be ours exclusively."

It is "fatal," Teilhard said of the old belief that we suffer at the hands of G.o.d omnipotent. It is fatal to reason. It does not work. The omnipotence of G.o.d makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of G.o.d. Good people quit G.o.d altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into G.o.d in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with G.o.d's omnipotence. As Baron von Hugel noted, Aquinas said that "the Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power to effect any imaginable thing, but only the power to effect what is within the nature of things."

Similarly, Teilhard called the explanation that G.o.d hides himself deliberately to test our love "hateful"; it is "mental gymnastics." Here: "The doctors of the church explain that the Lord deliberately hides himself from us in order to test our love. One would have to be irretrievably committed to mental gymnastics ... not to feel the hatefulness of this solution."

E V I L Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to G.o.d, "All your actions show your wisdom and love." Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, "That's a lie!"-just to put things on a solid footing.

"He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.

"He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty."

Again, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: "In all things G.o.d works for the good of those who love him."

When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadoran Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the sh.o.r.e of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If G.o.d's escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. In a soup kitchen, I see suffering. Deus otiosus: do-nothing G.o.d, who, if he has power, abuses it.

Of course, G.o.d wrote no scriptures, neither chapter nor verse. It is foolish to blame or quit him for his admirers' claims, superst.i.tious or otherwise. "G.o.d is not on trial," I read somewhere. "We are not jurors but suppliants."

Maybe "all your actions show your wisdom and love" means that the precious few things we know that G.o.d did, and does, are in fact unambiguous in wisdom and love, and all other events derive not from G.o.d but only from blind chance, just as they seem to.

What, then, of the bird-headed dwarfs? It need not craze us, I think, to know we are evolving, like other living forms, according to physical processes. Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution-chance operating on large numbers-so that, as the paleontologist said, "at every moment it releases a given quant.i.ty of events that cause distress (failures, disintegrations, death)." That is, evolution's "every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures." In order to live at all, we pay "a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin." It is hard to find a more inarguable explanation for the physical catastrophe and the suffering we endure at chance from the material world.

"Even when we are exercising all our faculties of belief," Teilhard continues, "Fortune will not necessarily turn out in the way we want but in the way it must." Karl Rahner echoes this idea: It is a modern heresy to think that if we do right always, we will avoid situations for which there is no earthly solution.

Guy Simon was a Presbyterian minister in Michigan. He sailed some friends out on Lake Charlevoix; the boat capsized, and a child and a man drowned. After he got ash.o.r.e, he walked up and down the beach hitting his hands together and saying, "Oh, pshaw! Oh, pshaw!"

N O W There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew G.o.d personally once upon a time-or even knew selflessness or courage or literature-but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

There is no less holiness at this time-as you are reading this-than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of G.o.d. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said "Maid, arise" to the centurion's daughter, or the day Peter walked on water, or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.

Purity's time is always now. Purity is no social phenomenon, a cultural thing whose time we have missed, whose generations are dead, so we can only buy Shaker furniture. "Each and every day the Divine Voice issues from Sinai," says the Talmud. Of eternal fulfillment, Tillich said, "If it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all."

There is, or was, a contemporary religious crank named Joel Goldsmith, for whose illogical, obscurely published books I confess a fond and enduring weakness. He says that G.o.d (aka "It") has nothing to give you that he (It) is not giving you right now. That all people at all times may avail themselves of this G.o.d, and those who are aware of it know no fear, not even fear of death. "G.o.d" is the awareness of the infinite in each of us. Repeatedly and rea.s.suringly, G.o.d tells Joel Goldsmith (and for this I cannot dismiss Goldsmith, clearly an American, possibly a football fan), "I am on the field."

CHAPTER FOUR.

B I R T H This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time. On wards above and below me, men and women are dying. Their hearts seize, give out, or clatter, their kidneys fail, their lungs harden or drown, their brains clog or jam and die for blood. Their awarenesses lower like lamp wicks. Off they go, these many great and beloved people, as death subtracts them one by one from the living-about 164,300 of them a day worldwide, and 6,000 a day in the United States-and the hospitals shunt their bodies away. Simultaneously, here they come, these many new people, for now absurdly alike-about 10,000 of them a day in this country-as apparently shabby replacements.

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. Repet.i.tion 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 bypa.s.sed 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d, these and other unpopular thinkers have no real difficulty pinning down, or spinning out, or at least addressing, our role and raison d'etre.

A standard caution forbids teaching Kabbalah to anyone under forty. Recently, an Ashken.a.z.i 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 mult.i.tudes 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 gla.s.sy rock can flake to a cutting edge only a few atoms thick. Prehistoric people made long oval knives of this surpa.s.sing sharpness, and made them, wittingly, too fragile to use. Some people-h.o.m.o 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.ses light. It s.h.i.+nes 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 ama.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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 p.r.o.ne 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d and force his hand. Or did he think G.o.d 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 Ma.s.s 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 publis.h.i.+ng. 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 publis.h.i.+ng, 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 G.o.d, 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 Lancas.h.i.+re 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.

N U M B E R S What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people? Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? Who told you? What, seriatim, were your sensations? Who did you tell? Did your anguish last days or weeks?

All my life I have loved this sight: a standing wave in the boat's wake, shaped like a thorn. I have seen it rise from many oceans, and now I saw it on the Sea of Galilee. It was a peak about a foot high. The standing wave broke at its peak, and foam slid down its glossy hollow. I watched the foaming wave on the port side. At every instant, we were bringing this boat's motor, this motion, into new water. The stir, as if of life, impelled each patch of water to pinch and form this same crest. Each crest tumbled upon itself and released a slide of white foam. The foam's individual bubbles popped and dropped into the general sea while they were still sliding down the dark wave. They trailed away always, and always new waters peaked, broke, foamed, and replenished.

What I saw was the constant intersection of two wave systems. Lord Kelvin first described it. Transverse waves rise astern and move away from the boat parallel to its direction of travel. Diverging waves course out in a V shape behind the boat. Where the waves converge, two lines of standing crests persist at an unchanging angle. We think of these as the boat's wake. I was studying the highest standing wave, the one nearest the boat. It rose from the trough behind the stern and spilled foam. The curled wave crested over clear water and tumbled down. All its bubbles broke, thousands a second, unendingly. I could watch the present; I could see time and how it works.

On a sh.o.r.e, eight thousand waves break a day. James Trefil provides these facts. At any one time, the foam from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth's surface. This acreage of foam-using the figure 4 percent-is equal to that of the entire continent of North America. By another coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population, in other words, although it is the third-largest population among nations, is about as small a portion of the earth's people as breaking waves' white foam is to the planet's surface. And the whole North American continent occupies no more s.p.a.ce than waves' foam.

"G.o.d rises up out of the sea like a treasure in the waves," wrote Thomas Merton.

It took only a few typhoon waves to drown 138,000 Banglades.h.i.+ on April 30, 1991. We see generations of waves rise from the sea that made them, billions of individuals at a time; we see them dwindle and vanish back. What will move you to pity?

I S R A E L When the Messiah comes and the world ends, the shofar will sound loud from the site of the Temple, and those people buried at the Mount of Olives-outside the old Jerusalem walls-will be first to awaken and arise in paradise. Those people buried elsewhere on the planet, tradition says, will "roll through the earth" till they come up there. Consequently many people have asked their survivors to bury them at the Mount of Olives, saving themselves an abrasive trip. An Antwerp Hasid explained to appreciative writer Robert Eisenberg recently, "A burial in Israel avoids the shleppernish."

Every year, sixty million people die; of these, half are children under five. Every 110 hours a million more humans arrive on the planet than die into the planet. Of every seventy-five babies born today in the United States, one will die in a car crash.

"For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it." Ernest Becker said this in The Denial of Death. Ralph Touchett, in The Portrait of a Lady, says, "There's nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That's the sensation of life-the sense that we remain." So I watch from the stern; I attend the wake.

Do you notice, here where we are, what Becker calls "the rumble of panic underneath everything"? Do the dead rumble underneath everything, and will we ourselves churn underfoot or pound? I think I notice no such panic, hard as I try, unless by chance for moments at a time I believe I will die.

E N C O U N T E R S I was walking in a broad and broken landscape. A stream ran between rocks; downstream, green shrubs sprang from its banks. The stream was the river Jordan, and this water flowed from its source, where three part-time streams met as runnels. The last people I pa.s.sed were speaking Dutch. The skies stretched to low horizons. No cloud pa.s.sed overhead, nor any bird.

The baked s.p.a.ce looked like the world's first day, when rainwater dropped on lava. It looked like the width of Being bare, where the raw shoots of abundance first stirred. I took a stony footpath upstream to where no plants grew. By the path flowed one stream of water. Soon the Jordan River narrowed to a sandy filament I could span. Ahead I saw the colorless spot where it arose, its actual source.

It was a damp patch of rock in a cleft of a low cliff. Here a spring met the earth's crust as seep. The seep widened around the rocks and pooled before me. This was the Jordan's source-a spring in the desert, wetting rocks. Here the crust of things cracked, and life entered and spread. There was room enough for everything. Ralph Harper wrote, "Why should one not try to imagine one's arms around Being?" A bent cyclone fence prevented my climbing to see the parched lands all around, and to see the many dry mountains to the west toward the Mediterranean.

In all this sober glory, something surprising appeared. At this desert trickle, beneath this cyclone fence, behind a young rock, I saw motion. Along came a blue crab. It picked its way down some sharp grains between rocks and settled in to work the area. The crab's sh.e.l.l was five or six inches long from tip to tip. Its blue-and-white legs minced on their points; it squatted to feed. Why are you wandering around in the desert, I thought, instead of swimming in a Chesapeake slough, or in a pot of steam? In fact, freshwater crabs are a delicacy; the Chinese, especially, prize them.

I looked for someone to show. In all the immense s.p.a.ce, under all the dry sky, only one distant man was walking, probably one of the Dutch-speakers.

And what should I call out to him? "Mynheer!" I shouted. He made his way to me over the bare ground. He wore gla.s.ses and carried binoculars. I showed him the crab. He was gratifyingly amazed-a big blue crab in the desert. The crab was easing itself along the chips and sand the water wetted, behind the cyclone fence. Its eyes moved on stalks. The Dutchman, too, looked for someone to show, but saw n.o.body. We discussed the crab, I think, and the sight of the crab.

Possibly the magnificent accent with which I'd shouted "Mynheer" impressed him, for he spoke Dutch, none of which I understood. I spoke English, which he doubtless understood. His tanned face showed pale creases where, in the sun, he had laughed. Pleased, he thanked me, and before wandering off, he looked at me significantly. So: his look said, we meet. So: in this queer bare spot, home of n.o.body under the sky, two humans stand side by side to look at a crab.

Later, I thought: This fleet meeting was not so deep as, say, a marriage-but it had its moments. Who are we people?

T H I N K E R The year 1737, district of Podolia, in the Ukraine. Twenty-five years later, the legendary boy Israel ben Eliezer had become the historical Baal Shem Tov. He taught all over the Ukraine, in Yiddish. His disciples' disciples wrote down his teachings. Every rabbi I cite here-except of course his predecessors-speaks in his name.

After he worked as a beadle to a poor congregation, he taught school, slaughtered animals, and kept an inn. His first wife died. He and his second wife moved to the Carpathian Mountains, where he dug clay. He lived alone on a steep mountainside and his wife lived in a hut far below. Two or three times a week she climbed the mountain and helped him shovel the clay into a wagon. She hauled it to a town for sale. When he was alone, he climbed the mountains' peaks; he studied, prayed, and fasted. Hear the tone of legend, and know, still, that it happened something like this.

After seven years, the two descended to his wife's city, Miedzyboz, a center of Jewish learning in every generation from the Baal Shem Tov's time to the Holocaust, since which nothing and no one Jewish remains. There, in Miedzyboz, the clay-spattered peasant startled everyone when he revealed his learning. There, intimate and radiant, he started to teach, and he taught until he died in 1760.

The men of Miedzyboz used to see the Baal Shem Tov in peasant clothes striding across the sky and opening heaven's vaults. This is the sort of vivid tale he inspired. His yellow hair hung long, and like a farmer he wore no cap. His regular dress was a belted sheepskin coat and topboots. He smoked a clay pipe.

He also flicked through the air in carriages. He interrogated on our behalf both the Messiah and Samael, the evil one. He often appeared, and conversed amiably with friends, in several places at once. One day in a pasture he caused sheep to stand and pray. His world has the exuberant and tumbled beauty of Chagall paintings-and indeed Chagall grew up in the Hasidic village of Vitebsk.

The Baal Shem Tov kept no money in his house overnight; if any money came to him, he paid his debts and gave away the rest. One night he felt his prayers blocked. He questioned his wife. In fact, she had held back some coins for the next day's food. There are hundreds of stories like this. He could read the history of any man's soul, and all his secrets, from the man's forehead, they said. He was clairvoyant to animals, too, and birds and trees. He knew all their souls' histories-for souls have genealogies quite apart from bodies'. (In Aristotle, too, all living things have souls, but those souls stay put and leave no descendants.) He used to dance at prayers. Sometimes he danced praying while holding the Torah scroll, as David had danced before the Ark of the Covenant, with all his might. The Baal Shem Tov's Hasids danced too. Of one dancing Hasid a witness reported, "His foot was as light as that of a four-year-old child. And among all those who saw his holy dancing, there was not one in whom the holy turning [to G.o.d] was not accomplished.... He worked both weeping and rapture in one."

The Gaon of Vilna, the Hasids' Orthodox enemy, deplored their dancing and leaping. He was not, however, averse to performing a spot of "practical Kabbalah" himself, and claimed that he could, by the theurgic use of G.o.d's name, "reproduce the solar system on a tabletop."

Sometimes the Baal Shem Tov trembled at prayers. Once, a disciple touched his robe at the shoulder and trembled himself. Once, the Baal Shem Tov leaned against the east wall of a house, and by the west wall the grain in open barrels trembled. A water trough in a room where he was praying trembled. When he stood still to pray, the fringes of his prayer robe trembled; the fringes "had their own life and their own soul. They could move even when his body did not move, for, through the holiness of his doing," he had "drawn into them life and soul."

As he aged he used crutches, and dragged his left foot. He smoked his pipe and wore his rough sheepskin coat and top-boots. On Rosh Hashanah, 1749, he took his life in his hands, he said, and prayed, "Let us fall into the hands of the Lord but let us not fall into the hands of man."

E V I L The Baal Shem Tov, by his own account, ascended to heaven many times. During these ascents, his friends said, he stood bent for many hours while his soul rose. He himself related in a letter on his return from two such vertical expeditions that he could not, much as he tried, deflect either moral evils or natural calamities. He could, however, report how G.o.d explained his actions. At that time Polish Christians were already killing Jews. On Rosh Hashanah (September 15, 1746), during an ascent to heaven, the Baal Shem Tov complained to G.o.d about the killings. He knew that some Jews apostasized, and they died along with the devout. Why-why any of it? G.o.d's answer: "So that no son of Israel would convert." (It would not even save their lives.) Later, an epidemic was scourging Poland. Again on Rosh Hashanah, the Baal Shem Tov's soul climbed to heaven. Why the epidemic? The epidemic, G.o.d gave him to understand, came because he himself, the Baal Shem Tov, had prayed, "Let us fall into the hands of the Lord but let us not fall into the hands of man." Now G.o.d, into whose plaguey hands they had fallen, asked him on the spot, "Why do you want to cancel?"-to cancel, that is, your earlier prayer. Now you want the Christian Poles instead of the epidemic? The best bargain the Baal Shem Tov could strike was to keep the epidemic from his town.

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