S A N D Earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground. Then the ground rises over your ankles and up your shins. If the sergeant holds his platoon at attention long enough, he and his ranks will stand upright and buried like the Chinese emperor’s army.
Micrometeorite dust can bury you, too, if you wait: A ton falls on earth every hour. Or you could pile up with locusts. At Mount Cook in Montana, at eleven thousand feet, you can see on the flank a dark layer of locusts. The locusts fell or wrecked in 1907, when a swarm flew off course and froze. People noticed the deposit only when a chunk separated from the mountain and fell into a creek, which bore it downstream.
New York City’s street level rises every century. The rate at which dirt buries us varies. The Mexico City in which Cortés walked is now thirty feet underground. It would be farther underground except that Mexico City itself has started sinking. Digging a subway line, workers found a temple. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. King Herod the Great rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago; the famous Western Wall is a top layer of old retaining wall near the peak of Mount Moriah. From the present bottom of the Western Wall to bedrock is sixty feet.
Quick: Why aren’t you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial.
It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy, Oxford writer David Bodanis says, because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently they snap off easily and go blowing about. Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folks who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts.
We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take,” says Bodanis. Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as “salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred microfragments from tropical forest fires.” These sorts of things can add up.
At dusk the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil. (Many inches of new topsoil, however, have washed into the ocean.)
We live on dead people’s heads. Scratching under a suburb of St. Louis, archaeologists recently found thirteen settlements, one on top of the other, some of which lasted longer than St. Louis has. Excavating the Combe Grenal cave in France, paleontologists found sixty different layers of human occupation.
The pleasantly lazy people of Bronze Age Troy cooperated with the burial process. Instead of sweeping garbage and litter from their floors, they brought in dirt to cover the mess and tramped it down. Soon they stooped in their rooms, so they heightened their doors and roofs for another round. Invaders, too, if they win, tend to build new floors on roofs they ruined. By the nineteenth century, archaeologists had to dig through twenty-four feet of earth to find the monuments of the Roman Forum.
A hundred and thirty years ago, when Heinrich Schliemann was digging at a site he hoped was Troy, he excavated a trench sixteen feet deep before he found worked stones. He had found the top of a wall twenty feet high. Under that wall’s foundation, he learned over years of digging, was another high wall, and—oops—another, and another. Archaeologists are still excavating Troy.
Elsewhere, the ziggurats of the ancient Near East sank into the ground rather than having dirt pile upon them; they settled into soft soils and decomposed. “Every few years, the priests would have them built up a few steps higher to compensate for the sinking of the bottom story into the soil.” Earthworm tunnels lower buildings, too, as Darwin noticed. These days the heavy Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is sinking, according to the cathedral’s recent writer-in-residence William Bryant Logan, who wrote the excellent book Dirt. The cathedral’s base “is now beneath the water table,” and “a living spring” has arisen in its crypt.
In Santa Monica, California, early every morning a worker in a bulldozer stirs the previous day’s trash into the beach. I saw it. He turns the trash layer under as a farmer lashes fields with last year’s leaves. He finishes the top by spreading a layer of sand, so the beach, rising on paper and Styrofoam, looks clean.
There are two kinds of deaths, according to an old saying that Rabbi Pinhas cited. One death is as hard as passing a rope through the ring at the top of the mast, and one death is as easy as drawing a hair from milk.
C H I N A In World War I, he had survived thirty months at the front; he rescued the wounded—it was his job—under heavy bombardment. A witness remembered his “rough-hewn face that Greco had prefigured” and his “total lack of ecclesiasticism.” One of the officers serving with him wrote, “Two features of his personality struck you immediately: courage and humility.” His regiment’s Tunisian sharpshooters, who were Muslims, used to say rather cryptically that a “spiritual structure” protected him when he plucked bodies from the ground in crossfire. In battle, he rejoiced in his anonymity and in the front’s exhilaration. Precious few men left the Battle of Ypres with a beating heart, let alone a full stomach, let alone exhilaration:
“Nobody except those who were there will ever have the wonder-laden memory that a man can retain of the plain of Ypres in April 1915, when the air of Flanders stank of chlorine and the shells were tearing down the poplars along by I’Yperle Canal—or, again, of the charred hillsides of Souville, in July 1916, when they held the odor of death…. Those more than human hours impregnate life with a clinging, ineradicable flavor of exaltation and initiation, as though they had been transferred into the absolute.” The “clinging, ineradicable flavor” was perhaps mud—the mud of Ypres in which two hundred thousand British and Commonwealth men died, ninety thousand of them lost in the actual mud.
Action he loved. His ever increasing belief that God calls people to build and divinize the world, to aid God in redemption, charged every living moment with meaning—precisely why the battlefield gripped him. “The man at the front is … only secondarily his own self. First and foremost, he is part of a prow cleaving the waves.” He dared title an essay “Nostalgia for the Front”: “All the enchantments of the East, all the spiritual warmth of Paris, are not worth the mud of Douaumont…. How heart-rending it is to find oneself so seldom with a task to be accomplished, one to which the soul feels that it can commit itself unreservedly!”
When he entered the war, he was already a priest. One dawn in 1918, camped in a forest in the Oise with his Zouave regiment, he had neither bread nor wine to offer at Mass. He had an idea, however, and he wrote it down.
Five years later, he sat on a camp stool inside a tent by the Ordos desert cliffs west of Peking. He reworked his old wartime idea on paper. What God’s priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that one day’s development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering. These the priest could raise and offer.
In China again, four years later yet, he rode a pony north in the Mongolian grasslands and traced Quaternary strata. Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Mass upon the altar of the world, “to divinize the new day”: “Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil a
nd sorrow of the world.”
C L O U D S Surely the most engaging of Jorge Borges’s fictional characters is the boy Ireneo Funes, “Funes the Memorious.” He could neither generalize nor abstract. “In his world were nothing but details.” “He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882,” and he could compare the clouds’ shapes to a pattern in marbled endpapers he’d seen once, and compare the clouds’ shapes to spray an oar threw on the Rio Negro before the battle of Quebracho. The fictional Funes, a Uruguayan, would have been fourteen years old on the dawn he saw the clouds.
Geologists have named fourteen thousand separate soils.
Some few wandering Hasids go into exile in order “to suffer exile with the Shekinah,” the presence of God in the world—which is, as you have doubtless noticed, lost or strayed. “The man who is detached in this way is the friend of God, ‘as a stranger is the friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth.’”
N U M B E R S One-tenth of the land on earth is tundra. At any time it is raining on only 3 percent of the planet’s surface. Lightning strikes the planet about one hundred times every second. For every one of us living people, including every newborn at the moment it appears, there are roughly one thousand pounds of living termites. Our chickens outnumber us four to one.
One-fifth of us are Muslims. One-fifth of us live in China. Almost one-tenth of us live in range of an active or temporarily dormant volcano. More than 3 percent of us are mentally retarded. We humans love tea; we drink more than a billion cups a day. Among us we speak ten thousand languages.
A hundred million of us are children who live on the streets. A hundred twenty million live in countries where we were not born. Twenty-three million of us are refugees. Sixteen million of us live in Cairo. Twelve million fish for a living from small boats. Seven and a half million of us are Uygurs. One million of us crew on freezer trawlers. Two thousand of us a day commit suicide.
HEAD-SPINNING NUMBERS CAUSE MIND TO GO SLACK, the Hartford Courant says. But our minds must not go slack. How can we think straight if our minds go slack? We agree that we want to think straight.
Anyone’s close world of family and friends comprises a group smaller than almost all sampling errors, smaller than almost all rounding errors, an invisible group at whose loss the world will not blink. More than two million children die a year from diarrhea, and eight hundred thousand from measles. Do we blink? Stalin starved seven million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed two million Cambodians, the flu epidemic of 1917–18 killed twenty-one or twenty-two million people….
The paleontologist suffered, he said, the sense of being “an atom lost in the universe.” Individuals blur, journalists use the term “compassion fatigue.” What Ernest Becker called the denial of death is a kind of reality fatigue. Do you suffer this? At what number do other individuals blur for me? Vanish? Our tolerances, I think, vary not only with culture but with age; children rarely grieve for strangers—“lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”
Teilhard called us “the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity … this restless multitude, confused or orderly, the immensity of which terrifies us, this ocean of humanity whose slow monotonous wave-flows trouble the hearts even of those whose flame is most firm.”
Los Angeles airport has twenty-five thousand parking spaces. This is about one space for every person who died in 1985 in Colombia when a volcano erupted. This is one space each for two years’ worth of accidental killings from land mines left over from recent wars. At five to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX. Similarly, if you propped up or stacked four bodies to a car, you could fit into the airport parking lot all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Tokyo in March, 1945, or all the world’s dead from two atomic bombs, or the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague, the corpses of Burundians killed in civil war since 1993. You could not fit America’s homeless there, however, even at eighteen or nineteen to a car.
Zechariah saw a man on a red horse. The man and horse stood among myrtle trees in a hollow, and other horses, red and speckled and white, stood behind them. Zechariah asked, “O my lord, what are these?”
The man answered, “These are they whom the Lord hath sent to walk to and fro through the earth.”
This took place on the night of the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month in the second year of Darius.
I S R A E L Through the jammed lanes of Jerusalem’s Old City came a Palestinian pushing a wheelbarrow and shouting, “Yo hablo Español! Yo hablo Español!”
Here in Jerusalem was the ongoing generations’ party and war, whence the groaning prayer of the world arose. Isaiah says: All nations flow to her. Streaming from the ends of the earth, we have come saltating to worship here—to knap ourselves round.
It was in the grand loose space at al-Aksa Mosque that I saw the lone long-bearded man sitting against a pillar. A black kaffiyeh wrapped him. He held the Qur’an in broadsheets up to his face, and read it. When I looked away I discovered, by triangulation and inference, that this old man had stuffed wrapped candy up his sleeves, great lots of candy, and was sneaking it all to the barefoot children. Whenever I looked back, I saw him absorbed in the Qur’an; he appeared not to have moved a muscle in weeks.
From the Qur’an’s Sura of the Cow: “They shalt ask thee concerning what thou shalt expend: say, The abundance.”
Painter Joe Ramirez and I were drawing Jerusalem from a roof. It was Easter Sunday morning, as the Eastern Orthodox church reckons. A Palestinian woman emerged and lifted her blue skirt to step from the door of her rooftop apartment. She squinted in the light, and her round forehead glowed. She walked across the roof to Joe Ramirez and me and handed us each an Easter egg; she had dyed one egg red and the other orange.
We are earth’s organs and limbs; we are syllables God utters from his mouth.
The Dome of the Rock surrounds Mount Moriah’s top; the peak bursts through the floor. Here to this bare rock Abraham bore his son on a three days’ journey to slit his throat, and here David built an altar which Solomon incorporated into his Temple. Babylonians destroyed the Temple, Hebrew exiles rebuilt it, and it stood for 970 years until Romans destroyed it 2,000 years ago. From here Mohammed, with the archangel Gabriel, rode all night to heaven on a winged horse. To honor the site not much later, an Arab caliph’s men had to dig through “many layers of debris” before finding the mountaintop. There they built the octagonal building scarcely altered in the thirteen centuries since. Its gold dome arcs over the rock mountaintop as the real sky’s dome arcs over the earth.
Now people like me peered over a high wall to see it as a great curiosity—the bare planet poking up inside a building. It was a great curiosity, and so were the people, for here was our condition made plain, and we came straining to see it.
E N C O U N T E R S Only some deeply grounded and fully paradoxical view of God can make sense of the notion that God knows and loves each of 5.9 billion of us.
Later that Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday, holding a dyed red egg in my hand, I was sitting in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel. Some stout Greek women came and sat in the cluster of chairs around me. When another joined them, I gave her my chair and sat on the floor. More and more came—big-boned, black-clad, wide women, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Then they all left, except the very oldest one, the very widest one. She could not rise from her chair. To help her I ditched the egg, held the woman’s black-sleeved upper arms, and pulled. It didn’t work.
“Sorry,” she said. I clasped my hands under her arms and behind her shoulders, pressing her bosom to me, braced my knees on her chair, and used all my strength. Still no dice.
“Sorry,” she said. She struggled and gripped my back; her upper body bore down on my arms, and her feet pushed at the floor.
“Sorry.” We tried again. When at last she rose from the chair, she thanked me: “Sorry.” I think it was her only English word.
Sometimes we tou
ch strangers. Sometimes no one speaks. Like clouds we travelers meet and part with members of our cohort, our fellows in the panting caravans of those who are alive while we are. How many strangers have we occasion to hold in our arms? Once there was a beautiful, wasting young woman in a turnpike restroom; I held her in my arms several times as she got in and out of her wheelchair, in and out of her jeans.
In the country then called North Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula, I visited a southern town whose tribal citizens had seen few if any Westerners. Hundreds of pedestrians were crossing an intersection. There, where jammed streets met, I saw a parked motorcycle. On a special seat behind the empty driver’s seat sat a baby, an agreeable-looking, solid baby, whom I greeted. The baby generously extended to me a key ring. I could not help but notice that several hundred Yemenis, the baby’s father or brother doubtless somewhere among them, abruptly stopped moving to watch.
I took the key ring, held it in sight, and thanked the baby, the way one does. The several hundred Yemenis held their breaths. I know they were holding their breaths because when—after stretching the interval until the first instant the baby began, visibly at the eyebrows, to doubt life’s very fundaments—I handed the key ring back, they all exhaled at once; I could hear it.
T H I N K E R His cantor testified that when the Baal Shem Tov taught Torah, his hearers received it from his mouth “as Israel had once received it at Mount Sinai through the sound of thunder and trumpets, and the voice of God was not yet silenced on earth, but endured and could still be heard.”
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