Even if Sophie read every single word he had written and every single word anyone had written to and/or about him, she could not exhaust him. He led everywhere; he led her outside herself. His pencil sketch for the Tree of Life was a metaphor for getting outside the unevolved self by small and repeated acts and experiments. The pencil lines shot out like radii.
And now Sophie knew them in a new way. No longer would she sniff at them as possible temptations, leading one astray from Presence. They were all—the animals, the vegetables, the minerals, the persons—suffused with splendors. They were splinters or better yet, tesserae.
Charles had changed her life. And so had his biographers. And so had the desert. Clean and clear and quiet and bracing, with spaces.
Mystery of mysteries, because of this man, she had a new faith. The Evil Genius was a holy man. Flawed and flawed like the rest of us, flawed like the whole communion of ordinary saints. But moving forward and encouraging each other.
“St. Charles,” the litany should read, “we beseech thee hear us.” Or, “St. Charles,” the celebrant should say and the congregation should respond to her: “deliver us.”
“Deliver us from the pestilence of a disembodied life. Deliver us from not believing that we could tip the scales, in infinitesimal and imperfect ways, toward beauty. Deliver us from a Flat Stanley of a God.” People should bottle what Charles has given them and carry it around in their jacket pockets as she had done with a vial of Lourdes holy water when she was a little girl.
In fact, a whole sea of waters had been rolled back. Charles had made a land bridge so we could escape pharaonic bondage; so we could cross to the far bank and glimpse an intricate and unfolding earth.
St. Charles. Come to think of it, he had stretched out his arms upon a kind of cross. He had suffered. He had given us the gift of utter reconciliation with creation, bitter pill that creation could be at times. He had given us the gift of the real.
However the scholars speculated about the source of his maladies, Sophie had no doubt that in some sense his body had been broken by his work. Or rather his body had broken on it. On the rack and the screw, if not on the cross, of constant and keen observation, on the rack and the screw of his study chair, on the rack and the screw of anxiety about evolution.
He delivered himself up for us. He had fractured himself, splintered himself and left us orchids and their nectars, sundews and their viscosities, worms and their turnings—in the flesh and blood of his books.
In her older age, Sophie now encountered what she had been looking for—sometimes in all the wrong places— all her life. Something—both immanent and transcendent—was no longer a blur; it was in the details and now she saw it clearly.
And it had happened because she had moved. Moved here to a quiet zone which was nevertheless red in tooth and claw.
What would happen if Sophie wrote of this? She understood what Charles had worried about before he published the Origin. Some people would see it as Sophie committing some sort of murder. Speaking of faith was not now fashionable or socially acceptable—just as smoking was not now fashionable or socially acceptable. Wasn’t it heinous to say in public that the Presence who set the Big Bang in motion had then turned around and let it evolve? Thus, free will crept into creation. Free will had a price.
William Blake had said, “Without contraries there is no progression.” Sophie had enough scars to know what contraries were. So did Charles. So did other people. So did the universe. Scars were nothing personal.
“Nobody move, nobody get hurt.”
Charles Darwin had written it: “Let each man hope & believe what he can.” In this he nailed some old religious legalisms to the cross along with his own body.
It would be shameful to keep that to herself. In the end, at the last, it would be just plain shameful. At the last. At last.
The Desert Floor
Jack stood outside her front door and agreed that she could drive with him to Buenos Aires in two days. “You asked…” he finally said in answer to her unvoiced question.
This led her to say, “Jack. I’ve never even set foot inside your house.”
“And so you haven’t.” He folded his arms and waited.
She meant to note every detail of his living room, but she saw only the huge oil painting. “Jack. The Santa Ritas.”
“Yes. ‘Santa Ritas with Bajada.’”
“Who painted that?”
“The artist is Charles Thomas, who moved here from the East Coast. He is a painter known for mountains, clouds, the desert floor. . . .”
Sophie had stopped listening. Hanging in front of her—practically covering half a wall—was, she thought, this new life of hers. Textured. Azure. Mt. Wrightson, Mt. Hopkins, Elephant Head. The bajada. But the sky and clouds were proportionately larger. Horizontal clouds. Vertical clouds. The combining of day and night. An impression of dryness and also a subliminal sense of approaching monsoons. Fissures of vague fire, deep in the ancient rocks. Lines of fire, pillar-like, thrusting up inside the Santa Ritas. Gleams of light everywhere. Evolving.
She heard her dead husband’s voice again, his speaking of the mountains. “Born of the molten, Soph. Sometimes I look at them and imagine them still smoking. Right there, right in front of us, are the real smoking guns. Everyone should move west.”
They drove south to Buenos Aires in almost complete silence. At the refuge, she stopped to read a wildlife sign and he went on ahead, on a walkway to an area shaded by trees. She studied the pictures and saw that one of the refuge birds was a Prairie Falcon. What would a Prairie Falcon be doing down here? She would ask Jack.
A sudden pain in the front of her right ankle made her wince. It took her breath away. When she looked down, she saw an ant on her sock. A groan, her groan, in its loudness startled even her.
Jack lowered his binoculars and turned. “What’s wrong?”
She ignored him in trying to flick the ant away. No luck. It seemed stapled to the stocking.
“An ant. An ant.” Then she felt another pain. “More ants.” Another pain. She tried to pull up her pants leg but a fourth pain stopped her. She should have watched where she was going; she should have kept her eyes on the desert floor.
He took a step toward her. He said, raising his voice: “Take off your pants.” He said, “Your pants have to come off. Come here to where I am. It’s secluded.”
She moved in a jerking, zigzag fashion down the narrow walkway of boards that spanned the shallow ditch.
“Don’t get so close to the edge,” he said. “You’ll fall.”
“Don’t tell me that, godammit,” she shouted. “I don’t give a shit if I fall off the edge, godammit, do you hear me?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Come to me and take off your pants.”
While she loosened her drawstring he tried and failed to brush the ant from her stocking. He said, “Lift your foot.”
When she did, the stocking was gone in an instant. He held out an arm so she could brace herself while she pulled off her pants and the other stocking.
A second ant, they both saw, was attached to her right inner thigh. Jack tried to brush it off and failed.
“Get it off !”
The second time he succeeded. She danced on her toes with the burning.
“Turn around.”
There were two more ants, one above her left ankle and another on her left inner thigh. “Ah-hh-h. Get them off, Jack!”
He said nothing. He knocked one off and then the last one.
Four separate areas throbbed. The pain was both surface and deep as if running all the way to her bones. A drill. Drills.
Jack turned her pants inside out. Sophie looked down.
That morning she had put on cotton underpants, the ones speckled with tiny lavender and pink flowers. And vines.
She was standing in the middle of the Bu
enos Aires Wildlife Refuge in her flowered underwear while the inscrutable Jack Bloom shook out her hiking pants. Beyond belief.
She laughed. Jack stared at her. She laughed and bent forward with the pain and the laughing. The unflappable man who had shaken her pants stood still.
On the ride home, Jack spoke. “How are you? How is the pain?”
“You have no idea.”
“I am sorry,” he said. “They were harvester ants. They cause some of the most painful stings known.”
They approached a border patrol checkpoint. Sophie said, “Ah. I shall tell these men I was bitten out there on the refuge and that I am in pain. I will tell them that perhaps they should put on their armor, search out the ants and dis-leg them; bind their jaws.” Sophie looked at Jack sideways. “No, I really I want to speak of it to them. Look. They look kindly.”
Jack turned toward her. “Do you think you are in shock?”
“No.”
Four men, one at a time, stood up from under a tent awning. Jack let the window down and one of the men, who appeared to be Latino, leaned in and glanced about the car. “Is there anyone beside yourselves in the vehicle?”
Jack said, “No.”
“Are you United States citizens?’
“We are.”
The young man compressed his lips and waved them on with his head. “Have a good day.”
“Thanks,” Jack said, “for all your good work.”
“Thank you,” the man said.
“That was a nice thing to say, Jack.”
The pain started to lessen only after two full days. Then it came to her that Charles had been bitten, “attacked,” in Argentina, by what he called “Benchuca (a species of Reduvius) the great black bug of the Pampas.” That sounded much grander than the source of her own attack.
When she read about harvester ants, she discovered that they hold on with their jaws and swivel to sting and then swivel again to sting. Swivel and sting again and again and again.
She had researched and read about the perils of the desert but she had never felt the brutality of the desert drilling into her own flesh until now. She bore the marks on her body. This was the way of evolution. And yet, and yet—persons in lab coats were at this moment working with venoms to develop pain-relieving medicines.
Jack had seen her in her flowered underpants. Half-naked. Practically.
She thought of D. H. Lawrence’s story: “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.” The daughter, a young woman named Mabel whose father has just died, finds herself unwanted by her debt-ridden brothers when they put their farm up for sale. Perhaps, one of them suggests, she could go to her sister’s house as a “skivvy,” a servant. Instead, she tries to drown herself.
A young doctor, a friend of one of the brothers, on his rounds to the homes of colliers and iron-workers in the English countryside, watches her walking into a pond. He runs over the fields and through the hedges, wades into the water and pulls her out. Then he carries her to her own house.
He removes the clothing of the chilled, unconscious woman; rubs her dry, wraps her in a blanket. Then he goes into the dining-room to look for spirits, finds a bit of whisky, takes a drink and goes back to give her some as well. After a while they exchange some information about the doctor’s rescue of her. And then, becoming aware of herself, she “suddenly” sits up and asks him who undressed her.
He tells her that he did. In order to revive her.
Mabel’s next question was stunning: “Do you love me, then?”
Oh for God’s sake. Why, Sophie, for God’s sake, are you thinking of this story.”
But she went and re-read it. She had forgotten the young doctor’s name. It was Fergusson. Oh, no. Jack Fergusson.
Right.
Death Certificate and Remembrance
Charles died at home, at Down House, in 1882. The death certificate read, “Angina Pectoris Syncope.”
This was where Sophie had begun, simply wanting to know how Charles Darwin had died. Just about the death.
Right.
And then she couldn’t stop at death. She had wanted to hang onto him through life and so she did. Now she found herself reading myriad obituaries and recollections as a way of not letting him go. One of her favorites was by Alfred Wallace himself and especially two sections from it.
THE DEBT OF SCIENCE TO DARWIN.
DARWIN’S STUDY.
THE great man so recently taken from us had achieved an amount of reputation and honor perhaps never before accorded to a contemporary writer on science. His name has given a new word to several languages, and his genius is acknowledged wherever civilization extends. Yet the very greatness of his fame, together with the number, variety, and scientific importance of his works, has caused him to be altogether misapprehended by the bulk of the reading public. Every book of Darwin’s has been reviewed or noticed in almost every newspaper and periodical, while his theories have been the subject of so much criticism and so much dispute, that most educated persons have been able to obtain some general notion of his teachings, often without having read a single chapter of his works,—and very few, indeed, except professed students of science, have read the whole series of them. It has been so easy to learn something of the Darwinian theory at second-hand, that few have cared to study it as expounded by its author.
. . . .
Let us consider for a moment the state of mind induced by the new theory and that which preceded it. So long as men believed that every species was the immediate handiwork of the Creator, and was therefore absolutely perfect, they remained altogether blind to the meaning of the countless variations and adaptations of the parts and organs of plants and animals. They who were always repeating, parrot-like, that every organism was exactly adapted to its conditions and surroundings by an all-wise being, were apparently dulled or incapacitated by this belief from any inquiry into the inner meaning of what they saw around them, and were content to pass over whole classes of facts as inexplicable, and to ignore countless details of structure under vague notions of a “general plan,” or of variety and beauty being “ends in themselves”; while he whose teachings were at first stigmatized as degrading or even atheistical, by devoting to the varied phenomena of living things the loving, patient, and reverent study of one who really had faith in the beauty and harmony and perfection of creation, was enabled to bring to light innumerable hidden adaptations, and to prove that the most insignificant parts of the meanest living things had a use and a purpose, were worthy of our earnest study, and fitted to excite our highest and most intelligent admiration.
That he has done this is the sufficient answer to his critics and to his few detractors. However much our knowledge of nature may advance in the future, it will certainly be by following in the pathways he has made clear for us, and for long years to come the name of Darwin will stand for the typical example of what the student of nature ought to be. And if we glance back over the whole domain of science, we shall find none to stand beside him as equals; for in him we find a patient observation and collection of facts, as in Tycho Brahe; the power of using those facts in the determination of laws, as in Kepler; combined with the inspirational genius of a Newton, through which he was enabled to grasp fundamental principles, and so apply them as to bring order out of chaos, and illuminate the world of life as Newton illuminated the material universe. Paraphrasing the eulogistic words of the poet, we may say, with perhaps a greater approximation to truth:
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Darwin be’ and all was light.”23
– Alfred R. Wallace
Who was the “poet” being paraphrased? Sophie searched and finally found that it was Alexander Pope, speaking of Newton.
5
I believe that his reticence arose from several causes. He felt strongly that a man’s religion is an essentially private matter, and one concerning himse
lf alone. This is indicated by the following extract from a letter of 1879:
“What my own views may be is a question of no consequence to any one but myself. But, as you ask, I may state that my judgment often fluctuates…In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying an existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.” 24
– Francis Darwin on his Father
Words and Works
Speaking of the Galapagos, Charles wrote that their natural history “…is eminently curious, and well deserves attention…we seem to be brought somewhere near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”
It was time for Sophie to really study The Origin of Species. She would settle down and read his Big Book. There, before she ever got started with Charles’s introduction lay, preceding the facsimile title page, two epigraphs:
But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpolations of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.
W. Whewell: Bridgewater Treatise
To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both.
Bacon: Advancement of Learning
How clear was that. No one had forced Charles to include either one of these in his own book. Where had he come up with the Bacon? How? It must have been somewhere in his vast and wholly organized filing system. Or maybe it had been ever present in his mind over the years. Sophie would not be doing him a service by speculating on his intentions—about which she didn’t know beans, really.
The Crossings Page 18
