For the Time Being Part 6

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 Inst.i.tute 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 Croisiere 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 Citroen caterpillar across "great folds of impa.s.sable 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 Citroen half-track, darted ahead into the waste, and picked up a chipped green rock, a paleolith, or a k.n.o.b 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 s.h.i.+fting basin of the Lop-Nor."

"I still, you see, don't know where life is taking me," he wrote his friend Max Begouen. "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, inst.i.tutions, 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 Croisiere 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. Jose Colon, 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 airs.p.a.ce, 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, gra.s.s, 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 fis.h.i.+ng, 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 h.o.m.o 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 h.o.m.o 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.

To help a living s.p.a.ce last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the gra.s.s at the cutting edge.

I S R A E L It was windy at the Western Wall-the Kotel-in Jerusalem. The wind was all but rending our garments for us, here where the Temple has been in ruins since Romans destroyed it in 70 C.E. A Hasidic Jew held his hat into the wind, and both sides of his long black kapote filled like sails.

Like other tolerated tourists, I prayed against and through the stones, forehead and fists to the grit, and stepped away. People have been praying against the wall for centuries, and stuffing written prayers between its stones. An angel, they say, collects these notes in a silk bag and delivers them. I saw one such note blow away. The wind carried a mite of red paper through the crowd and bounced it up the plaza steps. I followed, and caught it on the pavement.

Before I jammed it back in the wall, I opened the red paper. It was a wrapping like an envelope. Inside was a much-folded inch of white paper on which a tender hand had written the prayer -Que le.

garcon, don't.

j'ai reve, me.

parle.

At the Wall in Jerusalem, Rabbi Abraham Halevi-a holy man of Safad, and a disciple of Luria's-had a vision. He saw the Shekinah: the glory itself in exile, the presence of G.o.d. She revealed herself to him at the Western Wall, "departing from the Holy of Holies with her head disheveled ... in great distress." He fainted. When he woke up, the Shekinah "took his head between her knees and wiped the tears from his eyes."

Jeremiah had, in his day, a similar vision. Walking toward Jerusalem and weeping just after angels of the Lord had torched the Temple, Jeremiah saw "at the top of a mountain a woman seated, clothed in black, her hair disheveled, crying and pleading for someone to comfort her." "I am thy Mother Zion," she told him, "the mother of seven."

On May 4, 1995, I bought a New York Times in Israel and learned that a Hasid girl from Brooklyn was lost in a forest in northern Connecticut.

The missing girl, Suri Feldman, fourteen years old, had disappeared on a school field trip to Sturbridge Village, Ma.s.sachusetts. Teachers and students, 237 in all, had stopped for a walk in the woods at Bigelow Hollow State Park, in Connecticut near the Ma.s.sachusetts border. Suri Feldman separated from the group in the woods, and, when the school buses were ready to leave, no one could find her. Police from Connecticut and Ma.s.sachusetts were searching the pines and laurel breaks. Who are we individuals?

E N C O U N T E R S Again I walked among others spread in an open landscape, this time on a rounded mountaintop at 12,929 feet. It was from Mount Tabor, back in 1125 B.C.E., that the fighter Barak led Deborah's troops to swarm down on Sisera, captain of the Canaanites, and his nine hundred chariots of iron. Later three wandering ex-fishermen were standing on Mount Tabor's peak-or Mount Hermon's-when they saw light transfigure Jesus, and saw Moses and Elijah talk to him. The Roman general Placidus defeated the Jews at Mount Tabor in 67 C.E. Now I stood on a height and looked over the broad valley to the blue Sea of Galilee. Mount Hermon bulked north of the lake, and Jordan lay across the valley. The wind blew sand. One windswept raven pa.s.sed tilting. To the west the Carmel range edged the Mediterranean. In every direction I saw hills red and gray, and buckling dry mountains.

Nearby, other people were doing as I was-squinting east into the wind. We had all climbed most of the bare mountain's height in cars, and then walked several flights of stone stairs to its peak. I moved to go.

When I started to descend the stairs, a warm hand slid into my hand and grasped it. I turned: An Israeli girl about sixteen years old, a Down's syndrome girl, was holding my hand. I saw the familiar and endearing eyes, her thin hair, flattish head, her soft and protruding jaw. Worldwide, a Down's syndrome baby arrives about every 730 births. She met my smile, and her unbound hair blew in the wind; her cheeks glowed. She held my hand in confidence the length of all the stone stairs. Then she let go and rejoined her group. I went on to the black and volcanic Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war and formally annexed in 1981. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.

Every human being sucks the living strength of G.o.d from a different place, said Rabbi Pinhas, and together they make up Man. Perhaps as humans deepen and widen their understanding of G.o.d, it takes more people to see the whole of him. Or it could be that there is a universal mind for whom we are all stringers.

At all times use whatever means expedient to preserve the power of concentration, as if you were taking care of a baby. So advised Chan Buddhist master Cijiao of Chengdu, in eleventh-century China.

T H I N K E R By the time he was fifty, Teilhard said, he had awakened to the size of the earth and its lands. In only his first ten years there, he explored China at walking pace from the Pacific to Afghanistan, and from the Khingan Mountains northeast of Mongolia south to Vietnam. He had returned from the Croisiere Jaune expedition, worked all spring in Peking, and traveled throughout the fall. It was then, in 1932, three years after he met her, that he began writing letters to the sculptor Lucile Swan with whom he had taken so much tea behind her red courtyard gate.

In his salutations, "Lucile, dear friend" quickly became "Lucile, dear" and then "Dearest." She remained "Dearest" (sometimes he underlined it) for twenty-three years, until he died. Their published correspondence-hundreds of letters apiece-knocks one out, for of course she loved him, and he loved her. "I am so full of you, Lucile.-How to thank you for what you are for me! ... I think that I have crossed a critical point in my internal evolution, those past months,-with you.... My dream," he wrote her, "is to make you gloriously happy."

She translated his work. She molded for science a fleshed-out head of Peking man. For her he sounded out his ideas. One idea he returned to quite often was his commitment to his vows. He told her, "I do not belong to myself." In an essay he wrote, "Through woman and woman alone, man can escape from isolation"-but in right pa.s.sion, love will be, predictably, spiritual. "Joy and union," he wrote her, "are in a continuous common discovery. Is that not true, dearest?" He never broke any of his vows. (Both men and women who live under religious vows agree that while communal living irritates them most, obedience is by far the toughest vow, and not, as secular people imagine, chast.i.ty. Not a monk, Teilhard never had to endure twenty-four-hour communal living; obedience chafed him sorely; and he confided later that to maintain chast.i.ty he had, quite naturally, "been through some difficult pa.s.sages.") Lucile Swan wrote him, "It seems sometimes that I have to accept so many things." In her private journal she wrote, "Friends.h.i.+p is no doubt the highest form of love-and also very difficult." As the years pa.s.sed, he lived in Peking but visited France for months on end; he traveled to South America, Burma, India, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Java. They both lived in Peking, for the most part, for twenty-two years after they met, until in 1941 she moved to the United States. Missing him sometimes by a few days, she traveled in those years and in the following fourteen years to France, Rome, Ethiopia, Switzerland, Siam, London, and India. In 1952, when he was seventy-one years old, he moved to New York City, where she was living and exhibiting. They met frequently. "We still disturb each other," he wrote her across town. Especially disturbing to her was his new and deep friends.h.i.+p with another woman-another American, a novelist.

Even three years later, after he had survived a heart attack, and after hundreds of their love letters had flown all over the world for decades, after hundreds of reunions and partings, and after hundreds of visits in New York, he wrote her that he hoped that "things" would "gradually settle emotionally." There was not much "gradually" left, as he died eleven days later. A snapshot of Lucile Swan outdoors in her sixties shows a magnificent beauty. A dog holds one end of a towel in its teeth, she holds the other in her hand; the dog, looking at her face, is clearly waiting for her to do her part right. She lived ten years after Teilhard died.

"What is born between us is for ever: I know it," he wrote her. One fervently hopes so. One also hopes-at least this one does-that in heaven souls suffer fewer scruples, or, better yet, none at all.

The material world for Teilhard dissolves at the edges and grows translucent. The world is a Solutrean blade. It thins to an atom. As a young scientist, he held the usual view that the world is all material; from it spirit cannot derive. Soon he inverted the terms: The world is all spirit, from which matter cannot derive save through Christ. "Christ spreads through the universe, dissolved at the edges." This is the sort of idiosyncratic, brilliant lexicon that drives his theology-minded readers mad. Christ is chert, chert is Christ. The world is incandescent. Things are "innumerable prolongations of divine being." Or, "Things retain their individuality but seem to be lighted from within and made of active, translucent flesh."

Even the purest metaphysical Taoist thinkers, the Lungman Taoists, say that people "can a.s.sist in improving the divine handiwork"-or, as a modern Taoist puts it, people may "follow the Will of the Creator in guiding the world in its evolution towards the ultimate Reality." Even Meister Eckhart said, "G.o.d needs man." G.o.d needs man to disclose him, complete him, and fulfill him, Teilhard said. His friend Abbe Paul Grenet paraphrased his thinking about G.o.d: "His name is holy, but it is up to us to sanctify it; his reign is universal, but it is up to us to make him reign; his will is done, but it is up to us to accomplish it." "Little by little," the paleontologist himself said, "the work is being done."

E V I L May 5, 1995: The missing girl was a thin Lubavitcher Hasid; she was wearing a blue plaid s.h.i.+rt, a long blue skirt, and a windbreaker. A few months earlier, a twelve-year-old named Holly Piirainen disappeared in the same forest, and searchers had eventually found her murdered body.

The previous night, which Suri Feldman presumably pa.s.sed in the woods, and which her parents presumably pa.s.sed in living h.e.l.l, had been cold; it rained several times before dawn. Now meteorologists were predicting a heavy rain. When one of us dies, William James said, it is as if an eye of the world had closed. What is the possible relation between the "oyster-like, gray, or quite black" Absolute and a Brooklyn schoolgirl in a plaid s.h.i.+rt? Well, that's just the question, isn't it?

"For the Jew the world is not completed; people must complete it." So said a nineteenth-century Frenchman, Edmund Fleg. Recently Lawrence Kushner stated the same idea powerfully and bluntly: "G.o.d does not have hands, we do. Our hands are G.o.d's. It is up to us, what G.o.d will see and hear, up to us, what G.o.d will do. Humanity is the organ of consciousness of the universe.... Without our eyes, the Holy One of Being would be blind."

May 6, 1995: Among the thousand volunteers searching the woods for Suri Feldman were six hundred Hasidim, bearded men in black three-piece suits, who drove from New York, from Montreal, Boston, and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. One group brought truckloads of kosher food for all the searchers. Isaac Fortgang of Boston explained, "It says in the Bible that to save a life is to save the entire world." It is the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 37a) that says, "He who saves one life in Israel is considered as if he saved the whole world." Suri, the paper said, was one of fifteen Feldman children.

Her father, who works in real estate, brought to the woods her pillow from home so bloodhounds could get a scent. The bloodhounds, police, firefighters, volunteers, and even helicopter pilots using infrared sensors could find no trace of her. Police were looking for a slender man in his early twenties; the paper printed a sketch. Meteorologists called for a 100 percent chance of rain that night, and temperatures in the forties.

Aryeh Kaplan, who wrote Jewish Meditation, cites the paradox that the G.o.d of the galaxies, for whom a galaxy is "no more significant than a bacterium," is at the same time "great enough that a single human being can be as significant to Him as an entire universe." Many people cannot tolerate living with paradox. Where the air is paradoxical, they avoid breathing and exit fast. (Of course, many people also disapprove of Mircea Eliade's task of comparing religions-as if comparison itself were somehow disrespectful of each religion's uniqueness.) In the United States, only 6,381 of us die a day, on average, and 10,852 new people emerge from their mothers. Her mother remembers Suri Feldman's birth and everything else about her, I expect.

On April 14, 1977, at dawn, I saw a cloud in the west from an island in the Pacific Northwest. The cloud looked like a fish fillet. Recently, hundreds of volunteers searched the world's skies, but they could not find the cloud again.

N O W Now, back and forth across the top of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, a man is walking day and night without ceasing. It is the Baal Shem Tov, limping in his topboots, who thought most of the best of these thoughts.

Now, on a sidewalk outside a U.S. hospital, three twiglike hominids are walking, male and female and child. One of them experiences a moment of doubt.

Now, in striped prison clothes on his cot, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is writing a letter to express his-outdated and perhaps when all is said and done, even accurate-belief that "the theological category" between G.o.d and human fate is "blessing." He hopes someone will find a moment to untie this thought.

Now, somewhere in the northern hemisphere, a woman is carrying over her arm a basket in which sits her superior-looking child, a bird-headed dwarf.

Now, visible though the window from my daughter's crowded homework table, a thin man sorts bones on a crate by his tent. Does this bony sorter of bones know the Mishnah? During the six days of creation, according to the Mishnah, G.o.d created the idea of fire and the idea of mules. Later, people discovered how to make them: fire, and mules, with which the man is exploring the desert.

May 7, 1995: They found the Hasid girl. Suri Feldman had lain low in the woods near Breakneck Brook. She left a fresh footprint. An Irish cop from Ma.s.sachusetts noticed a nearby dirt road that no one had searched. With five other cops he drove down it and saw her beside a tree. She was warm enough, thirsty, fine. Hearing that she was found, the Hasids in the woods danced. A volunteer searcher from upstate New York said, "We're gone. See you later, Connecticut." Various authorities took the girl to the hospital, checked her over, and brought her home. When the vehicle bearing her drove into the Brooklyn parking lot, it could scarcely move. Hasids filled the lot, Hasids in black coats from the eighteenth century and black beards and black hats. A local volunteer said, "I've never seen so many people dance in a circle."

An orange banner hung in her neighborhood, the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. In Hebrew letters, it read "Say praise to G.o.d, for his goodness is for always." It is true that joy recurs.

"The worst thing about death must be the first night," wrote the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez. Inside the walls of Jerusalem, a Roman soldier flays an old man. He separates his muscles from his bones with a horse's currycomb. A doctor labors over a newborn baby's face. After a long time, the baby starts breathing. It gasps, stretches, and begins to wail.

G.o.d's being immanent, said Abraham Joshua Heschel, depends on us. Our hearts, minds, and souls impel our spines to lift or dig, our arms to take or give, our lips to speak good words or bad ones. G.o.d needs man; kenotically or not, he places himself in our hands. Some Christian fundamentalists, too, find this most modern of ideas invigorating.

In March, 1992, Brother Carl Porter, an Evangelical Holiness minister from Georgia, preached to a responsive crowd in Scottsboro, Alabama, where writer Dennis Covington heard him. "'G.o.d ain't no white-bearded old man up in the sky somewhere. He's a spirit.' Amen. Thank G.o.d. He's a spirit. He ain't got no body.' Amen. Thank G.o.d. 'The only body he's got is us.' Amen. Thank G.o.d." The only body he's got is us: a fine piece of modern theology. That it bollixes the doctrines of G.o.d's omnipotence and completeness-in-himself apparently bothers few believers, perhaps because it solves more problems than it makes-saving, for a mere example, the doctrine that G.o.d is merciful and good.

What was Jesus writing on the ground? A list of things to do before being crucified? An itinerary for the next few weeks? Go beyond Jordan, then to Bethany in Judea, to Ephraim near the wilderness, back to Bethany, and into Jerusalem?

"Till the very end of time matter will always remain young, exuberant, sparkling, new-born for those who are willing," Teilhard wrote. The finest loess and the finest sand are particles so numerous and small that they make clay: clay to make the emperor's stiff soldiers who kept his corpse company deep in the loess, clay the Baal Shem Tov dug for his living in the Carpathian Mountains, clay Lucile Swan molded over a cast skull of Peking man to make a face, head, and neck.

You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for dead tyrants' murders, and you alone cannot stop living tyrants.

As Martin Buber saw it-writing at his best near the turn of the last century-the world of ordinary days "affords" us that precise a.s.sociation with G.o.d that redeems both us and our speck of world. G.o.d entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, "the world in which you live, just as it is and not otherwise." A farmer can unfetter souls and free divine sparks in "his beasts and his houses, his garden and his meadow, his tools and his food." Here and now, presumably, an ordinary person would approach with a holy and compa.s.sionate intention the bank and post office, the car pool, the G.o.d-help-us television, the retirement account, the car, desk, phone, and keys. "Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls.... He who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness, in holiness performs the appointed ablutions, and in holiness reflects upon his business, through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed."

"It is given to men to lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned. Not merely to wait, not merely to look on! Man is able to work for the redemption of the world."

The work is not yours to finish, Rabbi Tarfon said, but neither are you free to take no part in it.

"In our hands, the hands of all of us, the world and life"-our world, our life-"are placed like a Host, ready to be charged with the divine influence." It is the paleontologist again, making a Christian simile. "The mystery will be accomplished."

That morning by the emperor's tomb in Xi'an, that morning beyond the trenches where clay soldiers and horses seemed to swim from the dirt to the light, I stood elevated over the loess plain, alone. I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the spade, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting.

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like s.h.i.+ngles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the gra.s.s. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.

Nurse Pat Eisberg holds in her arms a two-foot bird of prey, a kite. She releases the kite which uses one point of its forked tail to pry open the mouth of infant Leonardo da Vinci. The kite runs its tail's length between the newborn's almost invisible lips; then it widens into flight and flaps down the corridor. Pat Eisberg places the da Vinci bundle on the counter to her right and reaches left for another. This newborn, like everyone, is someone's great-grandchild. You are dead, and daily, then as now, waves of new generations appear in bundles on counters.

In Highland New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea, a British district officer named lames Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.

P E R M I S S I O N S A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: R & H Music: Excerpt from "Love Me Tender" by Elvis Presley and Vera Matson, copyright 1956 by Elvis Presley Music, Inc., copyright renewed and a.s.signed to Elvis Presley Music (administered by R & H Music). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of R & H Music, a division of The Rodgers & Hammersteln Organization, on behalf of Elvis Presley Music.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and Suhrkamp Verlag: Excerpt from "The Voice of the Holy Land" from O the Chimneys by Nelly Sachs, translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead, translation copyright 1967, translation copyright renewed 1995 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Rights In the United Kingdom administered by Suhrkamp Verlag for "In den Wohnungen des Todes" from Fahrt in Staublose, copyright 1971 by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and Suhrkamp Verlag.

ALSO BY ANNIE DILLARD.

Mornings Like This.

The Living.

The Writing Life.

An American Childhood.

Encounters with Chinese Writers.

Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Living by Fiction.

Holy the Firm.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel.

end.