For the Time Being

by Annie Dillard

  There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.

  C L O U D S Digging through layers of books yields dated clouds and near clouds. Why seek dated clouds? Why save a letter, take a snapshot, write a memoir, carve a tombstone?

  “One night, on February 27, 1856, a vehement east wind came from the desert and covered the roofs of Jerusalem with a thin blend of salt and sand. Panic reigned.” One may unearth this airy treasure by reading Israeli novelist Meir Shalev’s Esau. There, Shalev cites Ancient Graves of Jerusalem, from which he drew this record. Its author was Ermette Pierotti, an Italian archaeologist, whom Shalev characterizes only as “poet, architect, and orphan.”

  Augustine said to a group of people, “We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.”

  In his last will and testament, Rabbi Yehudah Hechasid, a Kabbalist and ethicist of the twelfth century, left numbered precepts for sensible and holy living.

  15. Don’t weep excessively for a deceased person. There are three days for weeping, seven days for eulogizing, thirty days for mourning…. Beyond that God says, “Don’t be more merciful than I am.”

  45. Don’t cut down a fruit-bearing tree.

  46. Don’t write in a book, “This book belongs to …” Just write your name, omitting “This book belongs to …”

  N U M B E R S We have dated waves, as well as clouds. On April 30, 1991—on that one day—138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

  “No, it’s easy,” she said. “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

  How are we doing in numbers, we who have been alive for this most recent verse of human life? How many people have lived and died?

  “The dead outnumber the living,” Harvard’s Nathan Keyfitz wrote in a 1991 letter to Justin Kaplan. “Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on earth run from 70 billion to over 100 billion.” Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us (by now we have swelled to 5.9 billion) by about 14 to 1. None of these figures is certain, and Keyfitz wrote that the ratio “could be as high as 20 to 1.” The dead will always outnumber the living.

  Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Many of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, and overexcited.

  Since there are at least fourteen dead people for every one of us, we who are alive now make up about 6.8 percent of all people who have entered the world to date. This is not a meaningful figure.

  Half of all the dead are babies and children. So we could console ourselves with the distinction that once we adults die, we will be among the longest-boned dead, and among the dead who grew the most teeth, too—for what those distinctions might be worth among beings notoriously indifferent to appearance and all else.

  In Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Paramo, a dead woman says to her dead son, “Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time.”

  I S R A E L In the beginning, according to Rabbi Isaac Luria, God contracted himself—zimzum. The divine essence withdrew into itself to make room for a finite world. Evil became possible: those genetic defects that dog cellular life, those clashing forces that erupt in natural catastrophes, and those sins human minds invent and human hands perform.

  Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity. The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels (qelippot) imprisoned them. This is our bleak world. We see only the demonic shells of things. It is literally sensible to deny that God exists. In fact, God is hidden, exiled, in the sparks of divine light the shells entrap. So evil can exist, can continue to live: The spark of goodness within things, the Gnostic-like spark that even the most evil tendency encloses, lends evil its being.

  “The sparks scatter everywhere,” Martin Buber said. “They cling to material things as in sealed-up wells, they crouch in substances as in caves that have been bricked up, they inhale darkness and breathe out fear; they flutter about in the movements of the world, searching where they can lodge to be set free.”

  The Jews in sixteenth-century Palestine were in exile—“a most cruel exile,” Gershom Scholem called it. They had lived in Muslim Spain a thousand years—far longer than any Europeans have lived in the Americas. In 1492, Christians expelled Muslims and Jews. About ten thousand Spanish Jews moved to Palestine. In Safad, they formed the core of the community of the devout. Here, unmolested, they contemplated their exile, which they understood as symbolizing the world’s exile from God. Even the divine is estranged from itself; its essence scatters in sparks. The Shekinah—the divine presence—is in exile from Elohim, the being of God, just as the Jews were in exile in Palestine.

  Only redemption—restoration, tikkun—can return the sparks of light to their source in the primeval soul; only redemption can restore God’s exiled presence to his being in eternity. On[y redemption can reunite an exiled soul with its root. The holy person, however, can hasten redemption and help mend heaven and earth.

  Luria left no writing. He tolerated foreign religious practices. He repudiated both anger and sorrow, for to him anger, especially, was the proximate source of all evil. At the same time, of course, he fulfilled the material laws of the Torah to the letter. Jewish spiritual life takes place in the thick of, and sanctifies, the multiple world of created things. Devout Jews then and now have big families. He did not despise the body; the body may be “turbid,” but its flesh shares in the joys to come. Luria warned his disciples against living in lonely places, or even visiting them. Like the other Safad rabbis, however, he walked often alone in the grainfields and orchards outside the town. I suppose they had so many children at home they had to.

  Rabbi Lawrence Kushner quotes the Talmud: Amemar, Mar Zutra and Rab Ashi would say this. Ribono shel Olam, Holy One of Being, Ani shelcha v’halomoti shelcha, I am yours and my dreams are yours. Halom halamti, I have dreamed a dream. V’ay-nehni yodea mah hu, and I do not know what it means.

  E N C O U N T E R S Quizzical encounters cumulate over a lifetime. Possibly when our brains fire their dying charges we will remember and see, to our dismay, not any best-loved face but instead some solitary figure, a stranger, whose image the mind retains.

  One morning I walked from a kibbutz to the edge of the Sea of Galilee. On the shore beyond me I saw a man splitting wood. He was a distant figure in silhouette across the water. I heard a wrong ring. He raised his maul and it clanged at the top of its rise. He drove it down. I could see the wood divide and drop in silence. The figure bent, straightened, raised the maul with both arms, and again I heard it ring just as its head knocked the sky. Metal banged metal as a clapper bangs its bell. Then the figure brought down the maul in silence. Absorbed on the ground, skilled and sure, the stick figure was clobbering the heavens.

  I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir. You have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? Your maul and your wedge? Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky—crack it at one blow, split it at the next—and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT’S with the bird-headed dwarfs?


  T H I N K E R After the war, poet Nelly Sachs called the Baal Shem Tov “The last sheaf-carrier of Israel’s strength.”

  The year 1712, district of Podolia, in the Ukraine. As a boy, the Baal Shem Tov worked as a beadle. We know little else about him, except that he read both Hebrew and Aramaic; no one knew he could read at all. Stories of famous rabbis as boys say they studied Talmud all night, each and every one of them, in secret, while everyone else slept. In the case of this boy, I think we had better believe it. His name was Israel ben Eliezer. Later, when people called him the Baal Shem Tov, the master of the good name, they meant he was the greatest of those who know and use the name of God.

  He was a yellow-headed boy; to move benches and sweep, he tucked his blond payess behind his ears. His family was poor as mud; his father was dead. He lived in the study house, in a back room with the broom and the washrag. For shelter and some food, he cleaned the place and ran errands. He joined his family for most Shabbos and holiday meals.

  When the men entered the study house in mists of rain, their boots resounded in the doorway and the air they stirred smelled like wet wool. They pulled their prayer books from their coat pockets and lifted their prayer shawls from bags. The boy saw his own male relatives. They found him simple-minded, he knew: He had already failed at his studies because he skipped school, and now he was failing as beadle, because he fell asleep.

  Standing, the men began: “What happiness to be in Your house…. What happiness to worship God!” After they uttered the last word of afternoon prayers, they broke into evening prayers at once: “God, being merciful, grants atonement for sin and does not destroy.” When the liturgy ended, most men removed their prayer shawls and phylacteries, and left: a few lingered to study. Later, if the boy saw a book left open on a bench, he spread a prayer shawl to cover its open pages. In his world, people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person.

  E V I L Emperor Qin declared himself the first emperor of China 2,220 years ago. He built the clay army and buried its thousands of men to guard his afterlife. In this century, he was Mao’s hero. The emperor longed, his adviser confided at the time, to swallow the world. He conquered all the neighboring kings and unified China. He standardized laws, weights, carriage widths, measures, money, and the mass of written characters. He built good roads and irrigation canals, razed hills and filled valleys. He built the Great Wall of China. China then, and for centuries and dynasties to come, yielded and enjoyed more fine art, literacy, wealth, and complexity than any other civilization.

  He was forty-five years old when he buried 260 real Confucian scholars alive. Some accounts say he buried 460 Confucian scholars alive. It scarcely matters—two hundred here or there. Whatever they and their wives, children, and parents suffered has vanished, too, whether he buried alive 260 scholars or 460. The emperor ordered his soldiers to plant some of them in pits up to their necks. Then the soldiers beheaded the sproutlike heads with axes; they bent their knees to swing low to slice. Soldiers buried the other living scholars deep, and those died whole.

  “These scholars,” Emperor Qin explained, “confuse the black-headed people.” After he killed them, he burned their books: In fact, he burned every book in the empire except those in his own library and some farming and divination manuals. He ordered his far-flung soldiers to kill anyone who quoted books, and, for good measure, anyone who sang old songs.

  It is never easy to find good fill for construction. Many workers died building the Great Wall; no one knows if millions died or mere thousands. They were conscripted peasants. Under emperor’s orders, living workers crushed their fellows’ dead bones and stuck them into the Great Wall as fill. Similarly, perhaps, according to I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi, “ancient Egyptians forced the Jews to build their children as living sacrifices into the walls of Pithom and Ramses.” Again, chiefs in Fiji used to force captives to stand in the postholes of houses—to hold up the houses. Without iron tools it is, of course, cumbersome to fashion trees into posts. (Few thinkers try to guess why we are here; of those, few concur. Maybe we are here, or once were here, to serve Fijian chiefs as posts.) In Teilhard’s novel about World War I, a soldier says before a battle that if he dies, he would like his body “to remain there, molded into the clay of the fortifications, like a living cement thrown by God.” Doubtless the conscripted peasants who built the Great Wall, the enslaved Jews, and the living Fiji cornerposts held no such view.

  The emperor’s architect who designed the Great Wall tried hard—real hard—to build it to jibe with the magical terrain, but in the course of all those miles he was bound to have cut through “some veins of the earth,” as he wrote in his forced confession. For this geomantic blunder the emperor ordered him to commit suicide, and he did.

  The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?

  Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav said that God studies Torah three hours a day. The Talmud notes that God prays, and puts on phylacteries. What does God pray? “May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger.”

  After one battle, Emperor Qin killed four hundred thousand prisoners. After another he located all the members of families who were his mother’s family’s enemies, and had them buried alive. Those were cruel ages, East and West.

  Quite recently, English policy deliberately starved a million men, women, and children in Ireland—one person in eight. Pol Pot killed one (or two) million of his own Cambodians—again, one (or two) in eight. Stalin’s decision to export grain, long before his 1934 purges, killed ten million peasants, and another ten million Soviet citizens died in the purges and gulags. Communist China’s death toll tops these hotly contested charts at seventy-two million victims; Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy alone killed thirty million people in three years, mostly by hunger. In 1994 Rwandan Hutus killed eight hundred thousand Tutsis in one hundred days.

  That mass killings and genocides recur on earth does not mean that they are similar. Each instance of human, moral evil, and each victim’s personal death, possesses its unique history and form. To generalize, as Cynthia Ozick points out, is to “befog” evil’s specificity. Any blurring is dangerous, if inevitable, because the deaths of a few hundred scholars or ten thousand people or one million or thirty million people pain little at diminishing removes of time and place. Shall we contemplate Chinese scholars’ beheadings twenty-three centuries ago? It hurts worse to break a leg.

  What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of “the individual”? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 million people in Asia—the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of the distance, as gravity does?

  Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in Thailand? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?

  There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.

  A dean of Canterbury Cathedral, who was perhaps a bit of a card, once found actual numbers so alarming that in a formal discussion, according to Huston Smith, he cried out, “Short views, for God’s sake, short views.”

  N O W The good times, and the heroic people, are all gone. Everyone knows this. Everyone always has. Formerly, there were giants in the earth. The Adam and Eve of legend had every reason to think that they lost innocence, botched paradise, and er
red their way into a time of suffering and evil. The men of the fifth century B.C.E. who wrote out the stories of Moses, of Abraham, and even of Noah, depicted them already pleading with God to save their visibly corrupt generations. The mournings of the wise recur as a comic refrain down the vaults of recorded time.

  Kali Yuga is Sanskrit for our own degenerate and unfortunate times: “the end of the end.” The Hindus first used the term between 300 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.

  In the Talmud, a rabbi asks, “The ancient saints used to tarry for a while, pray a while, and tarry a while after their prayer. When did they have time to study Torah? When did they have time to do their work?”

  Another rabbi answers, quoting yet earlier rabbis about the men of old, “Because they were saints, their Torah study was blessed and their work was blessed.” Already in the first century thinkers thought the world was shot to hell. Paul of Tarsus, living then too, called his days “these late times.”

  Almost sixteen centuries ago, Augustine looked back three centuries at the apostles and their millennialism: “Those were last days then; how much more so now!”

  “Nowadays,” an eleventh-century Chinese Buddhist master complained, “we see students who sit diligently but do not awaken.”

  In the twelfth century, Rabbi Judah Halevy mourned the loss of decent music: Music declined because it became the work of inferior people. It degenerated from its former greatness because people, too, had degenerated.

  In the twelfth century in Korea, Buddhist master Chinul referred sadly to “people in this age of derelict religion.”