For the Time Being

by Annie Dillard

  “There is so much worldliness nowadays,” Saint Teresa of Ávila wrote to her brother in 1570, “that I simply hate having possessions.”

  “Nowadays,” a Hasidic rabbi said in the late 1700s, “men’s souls are orphaned and their times decayed.” This was only one generation after the great Hasidic masters—after the Baal Shem Tov and the Great Maggid. “Every day, miracles dwindle and marvels go away,” said another. Rabbi Nachman mourned “widespread atheism and immorality in the world today.”

  An eighteenth-century rabbi said, “Newfangled people have appeared now who care about money.” “Nowadays, in these generations,” wrote a nineteenth-century Hasid master, the great teachers and prophets are dead, and all we have are “lesser lights.”

  John Ruskin as he aged judged that nature itself was collapsing. The weather had actually come unhinged—this after a rainy year—and it was “defiled” and “foul.”

  In our time, says a twentieth-century Hasidic rabbi, we are in a coma.

  CHAPTER THREE

  B I R T H Generations of physicians have, in their witty way, given jocular names to our defects. Happy-puppet syndrome produces severely mentally retarded adults who jerk and laugh. “The laughter,” admonishes the physician, “is not apparently associated with happiness.”

  Whistling-face syndrome, leopard syndrome, and cri-du-chat syndrome are terms to vivify diagnosis. Whistling-face people are, fortunately, rare: Their faces are thickened masks. Their eyes cross and roll up; their mouths and chins pucker. Leopard-syndrome people grow dark spots; their sharp ears protrude. The cri-du-chat babies, mentally deficient, mew. Leprechaunism babies suffer a metabolic defect. Wrinkled and tiny as leprechauns, they have big lips, big ears, and appealing full heads of hair. They fail to thrive, and die.

  In sirenomelia sequence, the infant, usually stillborn, looks (to a delivery room wag, and then only somewhat) like a mermaid. That is, the sirenomelia infant has only one leg, the knee and foot of which point backward, so that if these people lived to hop around—which they do not—they would never see which way they were going. Isn’t this kind of fun, once you get used to it? No. Outstandingly no fun are the dying or dead infants who look like frogs—no eyelids, gaping mouths, scaling skin. “Consanguinity,” the text notes of their etiology: Incest produced them.

  Many damaged infants die in a few days or weeks. The majority of those who live are mentally deficient. In Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation, the infants’ visible anomalies—their crushed or pulled faces, their snarled limbs and wild eyes—signal, or rather express in skin and bones, their bollixed brains.

  Here they are, page after page, black-and-white photographs, frontal and profile, of infants and children and adults at every age, naked or wearing briefs. The photographer stands these people, if they can stand, against a wall. A black-and-white grid marks squares on the wall, so we can see how off plumb their bodies are.

  From Degas’s notebooks: “There are, naturally, feelings that one cannot render.”

  Turn the page. Here she is. Of the thousand or so photographs in this book, this one most terrifies me. She is an ebulliently happy and pretty little girl. She is wearing a pair of cotton underpants. She has dark hair, bangs, and two wavy ponytails tied with yarn bows. Sure of her charm, she smiles directly at the camera; her young face shines with confidence and pleasure: Am I not cute? She is indeed cute. She is three. She has raised her arms at the elbows as if approaching the photographer for a hug. Actually, a physician has likely asked her to raise her arms to display them. Symptomatically, she cannot straighten her elbows; no one who suffers femoral hypoplasia—short legs—can. Her legs are pathologically short. (A photograph of an infant victim of this disorder shows feet sticking directly from loins and diaper.) If this child lowered her arms, her hands would extend well below her knees. No plastic surgery could help. Intelligence: normal. She is, in the photograph, delighted with her world and herself. Someone brushes her hair. Someone ties her hair bows. Someone adores her, and why not? “Someone loves us all,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote.

  On the facing page stands another short-legged kid, a crooked boy who is five. His malformed legs are short as fists—so short that his fingers, could he extend his elbows, would graze his ankles. His body is otherwise fine. He can grow up and have children. He has a handsome young face, this boy; he stands naked against the black-and-white grid wall. He looks grim. He tilts his head down and looks up at the camera. His eyes accuse, his brows defy, his mouth mourns.

  The confident girl and the sorrowing boy, facing each other on opposite pages, make it appear as if, at some time between the ages of three and five, these kids catch on. Their legs are short, and it is going to be more of a problem than buying clothes.

  “Rise at midnight,” said a Hasid master, “and weep for your sins.” But we have said that all nature disregards our sins. Our sins have nothing to do with our physical fates. When you shell peas, you notice that defective germ plasm shrivels one pea in almost every pod. I ain’t so pretty myself.

  S A N D A few years ago, I grew interested in sand. Why is there sand in deserts? Where does it come from? I thought ocean waves made sand on seashores: waves pounded continents’ rock and shattered it to stone, gravel, and finally sand. This, I learned, is only slightly true.

  Lichens, and ice and salt crystals, make more sand than ocean waves do. On mountaintops and on hillsides you see cracked rock faces and boulders. Lichens grow on them, in rings or tufts. “The still explosions on the rocks/the lichens grow in gray, concentric shocks,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop. These explosions blast the rocks; lichens secrete acids, which break minerals. Lichens widen rocks’ cracks, growing salt crystals split them further, and freezing water shatters them.

  Glaciers make some sand; their bottoms pluck boulders and stones that scour all the land in their paths. When glaciers melt, they leave in outwash plains boulders, rocks, gravels, sand, and clays—the sand ground to floury powder. Winds lift the sand and bear it aloft.

  Mostly, the continents’ streams and rivers make sand. Streams, especially, and fast rivers bear bouncing rocks that knock the earth, and break themselves into sharp chips of sand. The sand grains leap—saltate—downstream. So the banks and bottoms of most streams are sandy. Look in any small stream in the woods or mountains, as far inland as you like. That stream is making sand, and sand lies on its bed. Caddis-fly larvae use it as stones for their odd masonry houses.

  Rivers bear sand to the sea. As rivers slow, they drop their sand, and harbors silt up and deltas spread. If the land’s rock is fresh lava, as it is in Tahiti and on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, the sand the streams bear down to the beaches is black. If the inland rock is basaltic, like the Columbia River plateau’s, the sand the river carries to beaches is dark and fine. If the rock is granite, as it is in the eastern United States, the sand is pale quartz and feldspar, granite’s parts.

  When Los Angeles and Orange Counties dammed their intermittent streams, all the beaches from Los Angeles to Newport Beach lost their sand supply. Those weak hillside streams, which had never even flowed year-round, had supplied all that sand. Now beach towns buy dredged harbor sand to ship and dump.

  Coastal currents smear sand round the continents’ edges. So there is sand on ocean beaches. Ocean waves do not make stony sand except where waves beat cliffs. Mostly, waves and longshore currents spread river sand coastwise, and waves fling it back at the continents’ feet. Ocean waves crumble dead coral reefs. And parrotfish eat coral polyps. The fish do not digest the corals’ limey bits, but instead defecate them in dribbles, making that grand white sand we prize on tropical beaches and shallow sea floors. Little or no sand lies under the deep oceans.

  Why is there sand in deserts? Because windblown sand collects in every low place, and deserts are low, like beaches. However far you live from the sea, however high your altitude, you will find sand in ditches, in roadside drains, and in cracks between rocks and sidewalks.

 
Sand collects in flat places too, like high-altitude deserts. During interglacials, such as the one in which we live now, soils dry. Clay particles clump and lie low; sand grains part and blow about. Winds drop sand by weight, as one drops anything when it gets too heavy for one’s strength. Winds carry light stone dust—loess—far afield. Wherever they drop it, it stays put in only a few places: in the rich prairies in central North America, and in precious flat basins in China and Russia.

  C H I N A Teilhard had glimpsed the Gobi Desert from muleback on his 1923 Ordos expedition. It was the biggest desert on earth: five hundred thousand square miles of sandstorms and ravaged plateaus in what was then northern Mongolia. “As far as the eye could see around us, over the vast plain which had once been leveled by the Yellow River, waved the grass of the steppes.” The solitudes moved him: the “wide torrential valleys where herds of gazelles could be seen, nose to wind, among the pebbles and the sparse grass…. We were crossing the low steppes of San-Tao-Ho. The Mongolians are now no longer here…. The season of the yellow winds is over.”

  The next morning, he broke camp by the waters of the Shiling-Gol and moved toward Kalgan in the Gobi, an area science did not know. He found fossils. Two days later, he was wielding a pick at the Dalai-Nor, a wet salt pan twenty-five miles long on the Mongolian steppe. He shook and spread his bedroll on a dune by the shore. Six oxcarts carried supplies and boxes of extinct Tertiary horse and rhino bones.

  He resumed his teaching post in Paris the next year. In the next few years he lived again in China, undertook another Gobi expedition, returned to Paris, rode a mule on a geologic journey through the Mabla Massif in Ethiopia, and trekked for months digging bones and breaking rocks in both the Ordos and Manchuria.

  In the field he wore a tough jacket and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. In one breast pocket he carried a breviary, and in the other a pack of Gauloises. “This man with the clear regard,” a friend called him. He was long-boned, sharp-faced, faintly smiling when serious, and merry in company. When he laughed his face split into planes. All his life he parted his short hair on the left. His friends were mostly geologists, paleontologists, priests, explorers, educated Paris and New York women, and archaeologists. Among them were an odd trio: Julian Huxley, Henry Clay Frick, and Paul Valéry.

  Sandstorms nauseate by generating static electricity—eighty volts per square yard. A Dutch geographer discovered a cure. Walking through a sandstorm, he dragged a car jack behind him; the jack grounded the voltage.

  The paleontologist once called God “punctiform”: “It is precisely because he is so infinitely profound and punctiform that God is infinitely near.” Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform? I think so.

  Of the gospel miracles he wrote, “I feel obliged to admit that I believe not because of but in spite of the miracles.”

  C L O U D S We are fortunate to possess a kind of Domesday Book for the cloud population in the summer of 1869 in the California Sierra.

  On June 12 of that year, John Muir noted from the North Fork of the Merced River: “Cumuli rising to the eastward. How beautiful their pearly bosses! How well they harmonize with the upswelling rocks beneath them! Mountains of the sky, solid-looking, finely sculptured …”

  On June 21, he recorded a well-defined cloud: “a solitary white mountain … enriched with sunshine and shade.”

  Crisp, rocky-looking clouds appeared on July 2: “keenest in outline I ever saw.”

  On July 23: “What can poor mortals say about clouds?” While people describe them, they vanish. “Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God’s calendar, difference of duration is nothing.”

  We who missed witnessing them are yet certain that on August 26, 1869, at Tuolomne meadow, clouds occupied about 15 percent of the sky at noon. At evening, “large picturesque clouds, craggy like rocks,” piled on Mount Dana, clouds “reddish in color like the mountain itself.”

  September 8: A few clouds drifted around the peaks “as if looking for work.”

  Seventy-four years later, on August 11, 1943, a young woman wrote from Westerbork, a transition camp in the Netherlands: “It really doesn’t matter if it is I who die or another. What matters is that we are all marked men.”

  N U M B E R S Ten years ago, I read that there were two galaxies for everyone alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble space telescope, we have revised our figures. There are maybe nine galaxies for each of us—eighty billion galaxies. Each galaxy harbors at least one hundred billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are four hundred billion suns—give or take 50 percent—or sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, said an early report, that the stars are “not 12 but 13 billion years old.” Two galaxies, nine galaxies … one hundred billion suns, four hundred billion suns … twelve billion years, thirteen billion years …

  These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.

  They say there is a Buddha in each grain of sand. It is this sort of pop wisdom that makes the greatness of Buddhism seem aggravating. In fact, among major religions only Buddhism and Taoism can unblinkingly encompass the universe—the universe “granulated,” astronomers say, into galaxies.

  Does anyone believe the galaxies exist to add splendor to the night sky over Bethlehem?

  Teilhard de Chardin sent a dispatch from a dig. “In the middle of the tamarisk bush you find a red-brick town, partially exposed, with its houses, drains, streets…. More than three thousand years before our era, people were living there who played with dice like our own, fished with hooks like ours, and wrote in characters we can’t read.”

  Who were these individuals? And who were the Mongol Wanschock family—the man and five sons who helped dig? Who, in fact, were the manic Chinese emperor, the manic Roman emperor, and the merry, monkish paleontologist who dug? Who were the peasants who worked the far tomb-fields, the painter who painted clouds, Rabbi Akiva who prayed and Rufus who flayed him? The Trojans likely thought well of themselves, as we do, yet they are as gone as we will be; their last settlement died out in 1100 B.C.E. Who was that doctor whose hand propped the bird-headed dwarfs? Who were the Israeli man who split wood across the water, the nurse Pat Eisberg who washed babies like plates, the statistician who reckoned that we people alive today—displacing as our bodies together do only 1.1 billion cubic feet—would fit into Lake Windermere?

  Who were the families whose loess-buried hearths Genghis Khan rode over on ponies, the people Stalin killed, the 79.2 billion of us now dead, the 5.9 billion of us now alive, the stub-legged three-year-old girl exuberant in underpants and hair bows who held out her arms, or Isaac Luria in exile?

  Which of these people might yet be alive? The red baby likely lives, and his testicles have calmed to a normal color. Most of the Chinese peasants I saw working in a field are up and breathing. Maybe the Wanschock granddaughters are riding horses scornfully over the Mongolian plains, but husband and wife are long gone. The others have died, except probably the wood splitter whose maul rang the sky, and the thriving nurse Pat Eisberg. Is it important if the bird-headed dwarfs have died yet, or the statistician? If your father has died his death yet? Your child? It is only a matter of time, after all. Why do we find it supremely pertinent, during any moment of any century on earth, which among us is topside? Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of soil our feet poke?

  “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” Joseph Stalin, that gourmandizer, gave words to this disquieting and possibly universal sentiment.

  How can an individual count? Do individuals count only to us other suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts? Of Allah, the Qur’an says, “not so much as the weight of an ant in heaven and earth escapes from him.” That is touching, that Allah, God, and their ilk care when one ant dismembers another, or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it.
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br />   One small town’s soup kitchen, St. Mary’s, serves about 115 men a night. Why feed 115 individuals? Surely so few people elude most demographics and achieve statistical insignificance. After all, there are 270 million Americans, 19 million people who live in Mexico City, 16 million in greater New York, 26 million in greater Tokyo. Every day 1.5 million people walk through Times Square in New York; every day, almost as many people—1.5 million—board U.S. passenger planes. And so forth. We who breathe air now will join the already dead layers of us who breathed air once. We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.

  “God speaks succinctly,” said the rabbis.

  During the war, Nelly Sachs wrote,

  What shall be the end of the little holiness

  which still dwells in my sand?

  The voices of the dead

  speak through reed pipes of seclusion.

  I S R A E L The presenting face of any religion is its mass of popular superstitions. It seems to take all the keenest thinkers of every religion in every generation to fend off this clamoring pack. In New Mexico in 1978, the face of Jesus arose in a tortilla. “I was just rolling out my husband’s burrito …,” the witness began her account. An auto parts store in Progresso, Texas, attracted crowds when an oil stain on its floor resembled the Virgin Mary. Another virgin appeared in 1998 in Colma, California, in hardened sap on a pine trunk. At a Nashville coffee shop named Bongo Java, a cinnamon bun came out of the oven looking like Mother Teresa—the nun bun, papers called it. In 1996 in Leicester, England, the name of Allah appeared in a halved eggplant. Several cities—Kandy, Sri Lanka, is one—claim to own a tooth from the jaw of the Buddha. A taxonomist who saw one of these said it belonged to a crocodile.