For the Time Being

by Annie Dillard

  The Andrews expedition was a step up for the monsieur accustomed to mules. They drove Dodge trucks. Strings of camels carried gas. Digging, they encountered between five and ten poisonous brown pit vipers every day. The vipers kept them alert, one team member reported; characteristically, Teilhard never mentioned them in his letters. He liked Roy Chapman Andrews, who made his name finding dinosaur eggs. “A wonderful talker,” he described him, and a hunter who, when the team lacked food, drove off into the bright expanses and returned “with a couple of gazelles on the running boards.” Teilhard’s own vitality still battened on apparent paradox. The man who said that his thirty months on the front in the war had made him “very mystical and very realistic” now wrote from his blue tent in Mongolia that “rain, storms and dust and icy winds have only whipped up my blood and brought me rest.” They called the place Wolf Camp, for wolves and eagles hunted there.

  “Purity does not lie in a separation from the universe,” he wrote, “but in a deeper penetration of it.”

  The next year he attached himself to a rough French expedition as its geologist. The 1931 Croisière Jaune expedition took nine months and crossed Asia to the Russian frontier. He doubled his knowledge of Asia. He went so far west that he realized one day he was halfway from Peking to Paris. He and the other Frenchmen traveled by Citroën caterpillar across “great folds of impassable land.” They breached what the paleontologist admired as the unending corrugations of the Gobi peneplain and the monumental formations of Upper Asia. They crossed a region where mountains rose twenty-one thousand feet. The silk road’s northern route took them west to the Pamir Mountains as far as Afghanistan. On the road, the others reported, the paleontologist often stopped his Citroën half-track, darted ahead into the waste, and picked up a chipped green rock, a paleolith, or a knob of bone.

  “This vast ocean-like expanse, furrowed by sharp ridges of rock, inhabited by gazelles, dotted with white and red lamaseries … I am obliged to understand it.” He examined the juncture where the foot of “the huge ridge of the Celestial Mountains” plunged six hundred feet below sea level into the Turfan Deep. The Turfan Deep, in turn, opened onto a “vast depression” in which the River Tarim lost itself “in the shifting basin of the Lop-Nor.”

  “I still, you see, don’t know where life is taking me,” he wrote his friend Max Bégouën. “I’m beginning to think that I shall always be like this and that death will find me still a wanderer.” He was correct about his life and his death.

  Frithjof Shuon condensed the thought of the Gnostic Marco Pallis thus: “It is always man who is absent, not grace.” Nations, institutions, and most people dislike real religion, which is why they sometimes persecute its adherents, for the world everywhere prizes what Marcus Borg pinpoints as “achievement, affluence, and appearance,” and strong souls, they say, try to sidestep just these things as snares.

  Returning midwinter, the Croisière Jaune team explored an immense section of the Gobi no one had mapped. The temperature stuck between −20 and −30 degrees C. They dared not let the caterpillars’ engines stop. Twice a day they halted and stood, almost immobile in furs, by the mess vehicle, and tried to drink boiling soup in tin mugs before it froze.

  C L O U D S On July 2, 1975, the Baltimore News-American reported that on the previous day “a cloud of sand blown thousands of miles westward from the Sahara Desert covered most of the Caribbean with a haze. José Colón, director of the U.S. Weather Service for the Caribbean, said the cloud was the densest in years and could hang over the Caribbean for days.”

  On July 30, 1981, painter Jacqueline Gourevitch drew in graphite seven clouds above Middletown, Connecticut. The largest cloud tumbled out of rank. Dark and rucked at one end like a sleeve, it seemed to violate airspace, to sprawl across layers of atmosphere like a thing loosed.

  N U M B E R S Since sand and dirt pile up on everything, why does it look fresh for each new crowd? As natural and human debris raises the continents, vegetation grows on the piles. It is all a stage set—we know this—a temporary stage on top of many layers of stages, but every year fungus, bacteria, and termites carry off the old layer, and every year a new crop of sand, grass, and tree leaves freshens the set and perfects the illusion that ours is the new and urgent world now. When Keats was in Rome, he saw pomegranate trees overhead; they bloomed in dirt blown onto the Colosseum’s broken walls. How can we doubt our own time, in which each bright instant probes the future? We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.

  In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs—sure, we know this. But do not the dead generations seem to us dark and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii?

  We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out. You and I will likely die of heart disease. In most other times, hunger or bacteria would have killed us before our hearts quit. More people have died at fishing, I read once, than at any other human activity including war. Now life expectancy for Britons is 76 years, for Italians 78 years, for people living in China 68 years, for Costa Ricans 75 years, for Danes 77 years, for Kenyans 55 years, for Israelis 78 years, and so forth. Americans live about 79 years. We sleep through 28 of them, and are awake for the other 51. How deeply have you cut into your life expectancy? I am playing 52 pick-up on my knees, trying to find the weeks in a year.

  We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term replacement cast for a long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds move? Living things from hyenas to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling props between scenes.

  To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge.

  I S R A E L It was windy at the Western Wall—the Kotel—in Jerusalem. The wind was all but rending our garments for us, here where the Temple has been in ruins since Romans destroyed it in 70 C.E. A Hasidic Jew held his hat into the wind, and both sides of his long black kapote filled like sails.

  Like other tolerated tourists, I prayed against and through the stones, forehead and fists to the grit, and stepped away. People have been praying against the wall for centuries, and stuffing written prayers between its stones. An angel, they say, collects these notes in a silk bag and delivers them. I saw one such note blow away. The wind carried a mite of red paper through the crowd and bounced it up the plaza steps. I followed, and caught it on the pavement.

  Before I jammed it back in the wall, I opened the red paper. It was a wrapping like an envelope. Inside was a much-folded inch of white paper on which a tender hand had written the prayer

  —Que le

  garçon, don’t

  j’ai rêvé, me

  parle.

  At the Wall in Jerusalem, Rabbi Abraham Halevi—a holy man of Safad, and a disciple of Luria’s—had a vision. He saw the Shekinah: the glory itself in exile, the presence of God. She revealed herself to him at the Western Wall, “departing from the Holy of Holies with her head disheveled … in great distress.” He fainted. When he woke up, the Shekinah “took his head between her knees and wiped the tears from his eyes.”

  Jeremiah had, in his day, a similar vision. Walking toward Jerusalem and weeping just after angels of the Lord had torched the Temple, Jeremiah saw “at the top of a mountain a woman seated, clothed in black, her hair disheveled, crying and pleading for someone to comfort her.” “I am thy Mother Zion,” she told him, “the mother of seven.”

  On May 4, 1995, I bought a New York Times in Israel and learned that a Hasid girl from Brooklyn was lost in a forest in northern Connecticut.

&nbs
p; The missing girl, Suri Feldman, fourteen years old, had disappeared on a school field trip to Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts. Teachers and students, 237 in all, had stopped for a walk in the woods at Bigelow Hollow State Park, in Connecticut near the Massachusetts border. Suri Feldman separated from the group in the woods, and, when the school buses were ready to leave, no one could find her. Police from Connecticut and Massachusetts were searching the pines and laurel breaks. Who are we individuals?

  E N C O U N T E R S Again I walked among others spread in an open landscape, this time on a rounded mountaintop at 12,929 feet. It was from Mount Tabor, back in 1125 B.C.E., that the fighter Barak led Deborah’s troops to swarm down on Sisera, captain of the Canaanites, and his nine hundred chariots of iron. Later three wandering ex-fishermen were standing on Mount Tabor’s peak—or Mount Hermon’s—when they saw light transfigure Jesus, and saw Moses and Elijah talk to him. The Roman general Placidus defeated the Jews at Mount Tabor in 67 C.E. Now I stood on a height and looked over the broad valley to the blue Sea of Galilee. Mount Hermon bulked north of the lake, and Jordan lay across the valley. The wind blew sand. One windswept raven passed tilting. To the west the Carmel range edged the Mediterranean. In every direction I saw hills red and gray, and buckling dry mountains.

  Nearby, other people were doing as I was—squinting east into the wind. We had all climbed most of the bare mountain’s height in cars, and then walked several flights of stone stairs to its peak. I moved to go.

  When I started to descend the stairs, a warm hand slid into my hand and grasped it. I turned: An Israeli girl about sixteen years old, a Down’s syndrome girl, was holding my hand. I saw the familiar and endearing eyes, her thin hair, flattish head, her soft and protruding jaw. Worldwide, a Down’s syndrome baby arrives about every 730 births. She met my smile, and her unbound hair blew in the wind; her cheeks glowed. She held my hand in confidence the length of all the stone stairs. Then she let go and rejoined her group. I went on to the black and volcanic Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war and formally annexed in 1981. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.

  Every human being sucks the living strength of God from a different place, said Rabbi Pinhas, and together they make up Man. Perhaps as humans deepen and widen their understanding of God, it takes more people to see the whole of him. Or it could be that there is a universal mind for whom we are all stringers.

  At all times use whatever means expedient to preserve the power of concentration, as if you were taking care of a baby. So advised Chan Buddhist master Cijiao of Chengdu, in eleventh-century China.

  T H I N K E R By the time he was fifty, Teilhard said, he had awakened to the size of the earth and its lands. In only his first ten years there, he explored China at walking pace from the Pacific to Afghanistan, and from the Khingan Mountains northeast of Mongolia south to Vietnam. He had returned from the Croisière Jaune expedition, worked all spring in Peking, and traveled throughout the fall. It was then, in 1932, three years after he met her, that he began writing letters to the sculptor Lucile Swan with whom he had taken so much tea behind her red courtyard gate.

  In his salutations, “Lucile, dear friend” quickly became “Lucile, dear” and then “Dearest.” She remained “Dearest” (sometimes he underlined it) for twenty-three years, until he died. Their published correspondence—hundreds of letters apiece—knocks one out, for of course she loved him, and he loved her. “I am so full of you, Lucile.—How to thank you for what you are for me! … I think that I have crossed a critical point in my internal evolution, those past months,—with you…. My dream,” he wrote her, “is to make you gloriously happy.”

  She translated his work. She molded for science a fleshed-out head of Peking man. For her he sounded out his ideas. One idea he returned to quite often was his commitment to his vows. He told her, “I do not belong to myself.” In an essay he wrote, “Through woman and woman alone, man can escape from isolation”—but in right passion, love will be, predictably, spiritual. “Joy and union,” he wrote her, “are in a continuous common discovery. Is that not true, dearest?” He never broke any of his vows. (Both men and women who live under religious vows agree that while communal living irritates them most, obedience is by far the toughest vow, and not, as secular people imagine, chastity. Not a monk, Teilhard never had to endure twenty-four-hour communal living; obedience chafed him sorely; and he confided later that to maintain chastity he had, quite naturally, “been through some difficult passages.”)

  Lucile Swan wrote him, “It seems sometimes that I have to accept so many things.” In her private journal she wrote, “Friendship is no doubt the highest form of love—and also very difficult.” As the years passed, he lived in Peking but visited France for months on end; he traveled to South America, Burma, India, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Java. They both lived in Peking, for the most part, for twenty-two years after they met, until in 1941 she moved to the United States. Missing him sometimes by a few days, she traveled in those years and in the following fourteen years to France, Rome, Ethiopia, Switzerland, Siam, London, and India. In 1952, when he was seventy-one years old, he moved to New York City, where she was living and exhibiting. They met frequently. “We still disturb each other,” he wrote her across town. Especially disturbing to her was his new and deep friendship with another woman—another American, a novelist.

  Even three years later, after he had survived a heart attack, and after hundreds of their love letters had flown all over the world for decades, after hundreds of reunions and partings, and after hundreds of visits in New York, he wrote her that he hoped that “things” would “gradually settle emotionally.” There was not much “gradually” left, as he died eleven days later. A snapshot of Lucile Swan outdoors in her sixties shows a magnificent beauty. A dog holds one end of a towel in its teeth, she holds the other in her hand; the dog, looking at her face, is clearly waiting for her to do her part right. She lived ten years after Teilhard died.

  “What is born between us is for ever: I know it,” he wrote her. One fervently hopes so. One also hopes—at least this one does—that in heaven souls suffer fewer scruples, or, better yet, none at all.

  The material world for Teilhard dissolves at the edges and grows translucent. The world is a Solutrean blade. It thins to an atom. As a young scientist, he held the usual view that the world is all material; from it spirit cannot derive. Soon he inverted the terms: The world is all spirit, from which matter cannot derive save through Christ. “Christ spreads through the universe, dissolved at the edges.” This is the sort of idiosyncratic, brilliant lexicon that drives his theology-minded readers mad. Christ is chert, chert is Christ. The world is incandescent. Things are “innumerable prolongations of divine being.” Or, “Things retain their individuality but seem to be lighted from within and made of active, translucent flesh.”

  Even the purest metaphysical Taoist thinkers, the Lungman Taoists, say that people “can assist in improving the divine handiwork”—or, as a modern Taoist puts it, people may “follow the Will of the Creator in guiding the world in its evolution towards the ultimate Reality.” Even Meister Eckhart said, “God needs man.” God needs man to disclose him, complete him, and fulfill him, Teilhard said. His friend Abbé Paul Grenet paraphrased his thinking about God: “His name is holy, but it is up to us to sanctify it; his reign is universal, but it is up to us to make him reign; his will is done, but it is up to us to accomplish it.” “Little by little,” the paleontologist himself said, “the work is being done.”

  E V I L May 5, 1995: The missing girl was a thin Lubavitcher Hasid; she was wearing a blue plaid shirt, a long blue skirt, and a windbreaker. A few months earlier, a twelve-year-old named Holly Piirainen disappeared in the same forest, and searchers had eventually found her murdered body.

  The previous night, which Suri Feldman presumably passed in the woods, and which her parents presumably passed in living hell, had been cold; it rained several times before dawn. Now mete
orologists were predicting a heavy rain. When one of us dies, William James said, it is as if an eye of the world had closed. What is the possible relation between the “oyster-like, gray, or quite black” Absolute and a Brooklyn schoolgirl in a plaid shirt? Well, that’s just the question, isn’t it?

  “For the Jew the world is not completed; people must complete it.” So said a nineteenth-century Frenchman, Edmund Fleg. Recently Lawrence Kushner stated the same idea powerfully and bluntly: “God does not have hands, we do. Our hands are God’s. It is up to us, what God will see and hear, up to us, what God will do. Humanity is the organ of consciousness of the universe…. Without our eyes, the Holy One of Being would be blind.”

  May 6, 1995: Among the thousand volunteers searching the woods for Suri Feldman were six hundred Hasidim, bearded men in black three-piece suits, who drove from New York, from Montreal, Boston, and Washington, D.C. One group brought truckloads of kosher food for all the searchers. Isaac Fortgang of Boston explained, “It says in the Bible that to save a life is to save the entire world.” It is the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 37a) that says, “He who saves one life in Israel is considered as if he saved the whole world.” Suri, the paper said, was one of fifteen Feldman children.