The boyhood exploration of Edward O. Wilson (born in 1929) in the swamps of Alabama introduced him vividly to the diversity of nature. The jellyfish, needlefish, stingrays and porpoises, medusas, and rays enticed him in his earliest memories. “The child is ready to grasp this archetype, to explore and learn. . . .” This, Wilson observed, is “how a naturalist is created . . . the core image stays intact. . . . Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist.” What the Civil War experience was to Holmes, awakening him to the meaning of “fighting faiths,” the diversity of nature in the prolific waters of Paradise Beach, Alabama, was to Edward O. Wilson.
But what sort of naturalist would he be? A hereditary defect limited his hearing in the upper registers, which led him away from the world of birds. And, then, when fishing at Paradise Beach his right eye had been pierced by the spine of a pinfish that he had carelessly jerked with his fishing line. He was left with full sight only in his left eye, which proved to be more acute than average at close range. So he felt himself “destined to become an entomologist, committed to minute crawling and flying insects. . . . The attention of my surviving eye turned to the ground. I would thereafter celebrate the little things of the world, the animals that can be picked up between thumb and forefinger and brought close for inspection.” So Wilson the Seeker explained the origin of his lifelong venture as an entomologist. “Most children have a bug period, and I never grew out of mine.” In his explorations across the world—from Mount Orizaba in Mexico to the rain forests of New Guinea—he found new species of ants. He came to call himself a “neophile”—“an inordinate lover of the new.” He was persuaded that most of nature had still been undiscovered, that the earth was a little-known planet. Recent studies had estimated that between 10 and 100 million species of plants, animals, and microorganisms exist on Earth, but, Wilson observed, only about 1.4 million had been studied well enough to be given scientific names. And many of these known species are vanishing or in danger of extinction. Since the tropical rain forests are thought to contain most of the species on Earth, the loss of tropical rain forests depletes the ancient storehouses of biological diversity.
Human activities are destroying the tropical rain forests, at a rate of a little under 1 percent per year—with the result that roughly one quarter of a percent of species is extinguished or doomed to early extinction each year. To preserve the diversity of life, therefore, required a worldwide effort, for which Wilson developed a vocabulary. He gave currency to “biodiversity” (first recorded in 1985) and invented “biophilia” to describe “the inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life.” Wilson the Seeker repeatedly insisted that he had no interest in ideology. His purpose was “to celebrate diversity and to demonstrate the intellectual power of evolutionary biology.”
Wilson showed a dramatic flair for depicting the processes of biodiversity. “The most wonderful mystery of life,” he observed, “may well be the means by which it created so much diversity from so little physical matter. The biosphere, all organisms combined, makes up only about one part in ten billion of the earth’s mass.” He opens his brilliant and readable book The Diversity of Life with the story of Krakatau, a volcanic island between Sumatra and Java. The eruption of the Krakatau volcano at 10:02 A.M. on August 27, 1883, killed some thirty thousand people in Java, destroyed all life on the island, and reverberated with tidal waves and atmospheric effects around the earth. Nine months after the explosions a French expedition visited the remnants and scoured them for sign of animal life. “I only discovered one microscopic spider,” a French naturalist reported, “—only one; this strange pioneer of the renovation was busy spinning its web.” To catch what, no one could imagine!
This reckless wingless creature, Wilson explains, had dared to invade the sterile island by “ballooning”—a process employed by many species of spiders. They release a thread of silk from the spinnerets at the posterior tip of their abdomen which then catches an air current and stretches downwind like the string of a kite. These bold microscopic spiders had no control over their descent but happened to land where there was no competition. This incursion was only the vanguard of a miscellaneous invasion—a rain of planktonic bacteria, fungus spores, small seeds, insects, other spiders, and other creatures. Thus began from all directions a colonization of the once sterile island. Large lizards and crabs were washed ashore, and many species of birds never known there before. For Wilson the Seeker this was a parable of life on Earth, the relentless increase, multiplication, and variety of life.
Wilson envied the naturalists who had observed the variety of life being re-created on what remained of Krakatau. In search of “more Krakataus,” he found, or rather made, his opportunity close to home in the Florida Keys. There he devised a bold and novel experiment that would allow him too to follow the burgeoning of the diversity of life in a sterile environment. Wilson became the very model of the naturalist who, unlike the “scientist,” is more interested in the promise than in the system of nature. From his early Alabama excursions, he was obsessed by the mystery and variety of life. The spectacle of nature awed and entranced him.
Wilson devised his own experiment in biodiversity by creating miniature Krakataus on islands of the Florida Keys. He would sterilize an island, with the aid of a local exterminating firm, then study the natural return of life and the increase of biodiversity. In this convenient laboratory he found the data for his study of the “equilibrium of species.” And so in an age of decimating species his seeking spirit would open vistas of nature’s pristine diversity. “Today visitors walk along trails where tree snails still decorate the gnarled old lignum vitae trees and dagger wings alight among their delicate blue flowers and petard-shaped yellow fruits. The public can in perpetuity, I trust, witness the Florida Keys as they were in prehistory.”
From the worldwide census of animal and plant species, Wilson, seeking the diversity of nature, observed catastrophic consequences of the destruction of habitats. A 90 percent reduction of forest cover (or prairie or river course), he noted, eventually halves the number of species living there. Which only further reduced the proportion of nature that man would know: “The great majority of species of organisms—possibly in excess of 90 percent—remain unknown to science. They live out there somewhere, still untouched, lacking even a name, waiting for their Linnaeus, their Darwin, their Pasteur. The greatest numbers are in remote parts of the tropics, but many also exist close to the cities of industrialized countries. Earth, in the dazzling variety of its life, is still a little-known planet.”
All of this led Wilson to sum up his lifelong studies in his latest synthesis—his “three truths” of biophilia. “First, humanity is ultimately the product of biological evolution; second, the diversity of life is the cradle and greatest natural heritage of the human species; and third, philosophy and religion make little sense without taking into account the first two conceptions.” So Wilson’s seeking led him to “the very heart of wonder”—the diversity of species that was created before humanity and has never been fathomed to its limits. “Our sense of wonder grows exponentially: the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery and the more we seek knowledge to create new mystery.”
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The Literature of Bewilderment
The first half of the twentieth century, an age of triumphal and accelerating science, produced a literature of bewilderment without precedent in our history. This will seem less odd when we observe the consequences of the rising tide of science for Seekers and the search for meaning. The new emptiness of meaning and purpose itself became a resource for literature. And nothing better reveals man’s infinite capacity to seek something out of nothing and to make the best of his troubled lot.
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) saw the special challenge of his time, as he opened his unfinished magnum opus, The Book of Disquietude:
I was born in a time when the majority of young people ha
d lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had it—without knowing why. And then, since the human spirit naturally tends towards judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who’s always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide open spaces around it. That’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.
So he described the “moral landscape” on which a new literature would flourish and reach across Western culture.
This spirit of disquietude, which Pessoa expressed in his final, unfinished work attracted a galaxy of writers some of whom rivaled the great Elizabethans or the Romantics of the Age of the French Revolution. Pessoa was aware, too, of the vast openness of the challenge of his time, which he expressed in a Litany:
We never know self-realization.
We are two abysses—a well staring at the Sky.
The galaxy included some of the most influential writers of the mid-century—Camus (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1957), Ionesco, Pinter, and Beckett (Nobel Prize, 1969). This was not a school of writers but a cluster of dissimilar personalities, each making his own contribution—in essay, poem, novel, or drama—to the literature of bewilderment. The core idea was expressed by Albert Camus in his Myth of Sisyphus (1942): “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting is properly the feeling of absurdity.” The most successful and most influential form of this literature was the drama. For while the essay and the novel aim to explain the human condition, the drama simply shows. And the theater of the absurd revealed at the same time the power and the limits of words in revealing an absurd world.
Perhaps the most powerful and enduring figure in the theater of the absurd is Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who has been called the most uncompromising of the absurdists. Born near Dublin, like other Irish stars—Shaw, Wilde, and Yeats—he too came from a Protestant Anglo-Irish family. He studied Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, and taught school before going to Paris, which would become the center of his life in 1928.
He became a lifelong friend of James Joyce, and there was a wondrous unspoken rapport between them. “Beckett was addicted to silences,” Richard Ellman recounts, “and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often in silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself.” Joyce’s unhappy daughter, Lucia, was infatuated with Beckett, who took her to restaurants and the theater. Finally Beckett had to tell her that when he came to Joyce’s apartment it was mainly to see her father. He later apologized to Peggy Guggenheim for not having been able to fall in love with Lucia.
Beckett traveled about Europe, but when World War II came he settled in France, was active in the Resistance and at the war’s end remained in Paris. During these years he had produced an astonishing literary miscellany—essays, novels, poems, and plays. His turning to write in French, which was his second language, he described as an act of self-discipline. But he never explained this in a way that did not have the sound of the absurd. Perhaps there was some masochism in his choice of the difficult. He was afraid of English, he explained, “because you couldn’t help writing poetry in it.” But he did say that French “had the right weakening effect,” and that “in French it is easier to write without style.”
Beckett first attracted wide attention in 1953 with the performance in Paris of his En Attendant Godot (English translation, Waiting for Godot, 1954). Despite Beckett’s warnings against overinterpretation, this work was taken to be a manifesto of the theater of the absurd. It was, too, a perfect example of the austerity and sparseness of Beckett’s style. When the director of the first American production asked Beckett what was meant by Godot, he answered, “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.” Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, appear on an empty stage furnished with nothing but a solitary tree. They assume that since they are rational beings, there must be some reason for their being where they are. They assume they must be waiting for someone, and they call that person “Godot.” But they have no evidence that that person ever made an appointment to see them, nor even that such a person exists. Beckett contrasts their waiting with another pair, Pozzo and Lucky, master and slave, aimlessly wandering, whose aimlessness only reinforces that of Vladimir and Estragon. At the end of Act I, Vladimir and Estragon are told that Mr. Godot cannot come, but that he will surely come tomorrow. At the end of Act I:
Estragon: Well, shall we go?
Vladimir: Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]
Act II repeats the pattern, and ends with the same lines of dialogue, by the same characters in reverse order. The play has no plot, tells no story, but presents a challenging unchanging situation. “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”
At a poignant moment when Pozzo falls and cannot rise, Vladimir and Estragon speculate on whether to rob him or help him. Then Vladimir says, “Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Others would meet the case equally if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”
The slapstick comedy of the early silent films was in the spirit of Beckett’s absurd, which itself was in the tradition of the ancient mimes and medieval clowns and jesters. All these comic forms showed the dramatic power of wordless and purposeless action. Vladimir and Estragon reflect Laurel and Hardy; a version of Charlie Chaplin appears as Hamm in Endgame (1957); and Buster Keaton himself played in Film (1964). A feeling for the absurd allowed Beckett to see the comic where others saw only the meaningless. And so Beckett arrays the trivia of everyday life to entertain us with a patient depiction of the human condition. Which made Beckett’s insights perfectly suited to the ancient cathartic role of the theater.
With his feeling for the absurd it is not surprising that Beckett was fascinated by the mystery of time. His first separately published work was on the subject. During his first stay in Paris a prize of ten pounds was offered by Nancy Cunard and Richard Aldington for the best poem on the subject of time. Beckett’s prizewinning poem, which he piquantly titled “Whoroscope,” focused on his favorite philosopher, Descartes, reflecting on time, hens’ eggs, and other miscellany. It was published in 1930 in an edition of one hundred signed copies at five shillings and two hundred unsigned at a shilling. Beckett, then, was naturally fascinated by Proust, on whom he wrote one of the first full-length studies—a critical essay (published in 1931) focusing on Proust’s exploration of time. Time, as he wrote in his essay on Proust, would somehow give Beckett a key to novelty in the absurd ocean of experiences. This suggested, too, a theme of Waiting for Godot. The subject of the play, as often observed, was not Godot, but waiting, a habitual encounter with time. According to Beckett:
Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals. . . . Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that
separate consecutive adaptations . . . represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious, and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.
PART EIGHT
A WORLD IN PROCESS: THE MEANING IN THE SEEKING
But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. . . . no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.
—OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1891)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and science.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN, WHAT I BELIEVE (1930)
38
Acton’s “Madonna of the Future”
The eloquent prophet of the modern liberal spirit, Lord Acton (1834-1902), would poignantly refer to his unfinished lifework—a history of liberty—as “The Madonna of the Future.” This was the title of Henry James’s story of an artist who devoted his life to a single great painting, but at the artist’s death the easel in his studio showed only a blank canvas. While this way of describing Acton’s history was delightfully ironic, it was also wonderfully true to the liberal spirit to which he gave his life and his writing. His history of liberty has been described as “the greatest book that was never written.” Yet Acton became one of the most influential and most often quoted of the historians of his age.
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