For the Time Being (12 page)

New sand is young and sharp. Some of the sand in sidewalk cracks can cut your finger. The geologist Philip H. Kuenen, who devoted his working life to sand, reckoned, possibly imprecisely, that every second, one billion sharp new sand grains—of quartz alone—appear on earth, chips off the old continental blocks. Sand has been forming at this clip all along. Only a smattering of that sand ends up on beaches and deserts. So why are we all not buried in dunes? Because sand amasses in basins whose floors subside. Pressure cooks much of it into sandstone, as one crustal plate slides over another like a hand.

Exposed uplifted sandstone, naturally, can wear away again. A sandstone castle in Austria, nine hundred years old,
is itself returning to soil. Weathering has turned its outer walls to clay from which grass grows.

Sand grains bang about in deserts and wear down their angles. Kuenen went so far as to determine how much desert the world “needs”—2 × 10
⁶
square kilometers—in order, as
Sand and Sandstone
explained it, “to keep the world average roundness constant (to offset the new, sharp-cornered sand added each year).” So you can easily reason that if erosion and drought fail to form new deserts in Africa, say, at an acceptable pace, thereby starving whole populations, the ratio of the world’s round sand to the world’s sharp sand will get out of whack.

Volunteers in famine lands, and rescue workers who haul people from rubble and wrecks, say that those people who are near death have a distinctive look in their eyes. They call it “circling the drain.”

A woman of the Roman Empire had a wastrel son—a grown son, intelligent and spirited, who was throwing away his life on the deep misery of idle pleasures. Praying for him, she wept, and according to a contemporary account, “her tears, when streaming down, they watered the ground under her eyes in every place where she prayed.” At that time—the fourth century—people commonly prayed prone on the dirt. She went to the priest and begged him to talk to her son. The
priest refused. Just wait, he counseled, and added, “Go thy ways and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.”

It is, however, entirely possible. The sons of many tears have perished, and will perish.

Apparently even the priest thought our wishes move God and force his hand. Or did he think God rewards virtue?

C H I N A
      
       Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and a writer as well as a paleontologist. The theology and cosmology that drove his thinking and writing are not his strongest legacy, any more than William Butler Yeats’s theology and cosmology are his. He wrote eighteen books. The unhappy prominence of his dull, arcane, and improbably crackpot
The Phenomenon of Man
thirty years ago, and the occasional nutty enthusiasm of his admirers, some of them vague-brained new-agers, have obscured his intelligent, plausible, and beautiful
The Divine Milieu
and the short, magnificent literary essays “The Mass of the World” and “The Heart of Matter.” The world rarely can or will distinguish art from mere opinion. Pressed for his opinions, Teilhard produced them, and their peculiarly disagreeable lexicon, and the cranks they attracted, possibly tempted some possessors of good minds to write him off without reading him.

He took theology courses for four years, and admitted that he did not find them
bien amusants
. He studied chemistry and physics in Cairo; at the Sorbonne he worked in botany and zoology as well as geology. His doctorate in geology described mammifers of the Lower Eocene in France.

He ran afoul of Roman authorities over his thinking. In the 1920s, evolution was still a new current in thought, as the church reckoned, and it had not yet penetrated Rome’s layers of brocade. The notion of biological evolution seemed to hash the old doctrine of original sin. After Teilhard lectured on evolution in Paris, the church in Rome gagged him. It forbade him to lecture and to publish anything but purely scientific articles. He complied. Of his eighteen books, the church permitted only one to see light in his lifetime, a short scientific monograph published in Peking. The cardinals were pleased to keep his person, also, tucked away. They exiled him to China, the second time for virtually the rest of his life. He was forty-two. Always longing for France, for his Paris teaching position, his Jesuit brothers, and his friends, and always eager to settle for a life in the United States, he nevertheless discovered gradually that his vow of obedience required him to renounce the West for twenty-two years more.

Every year, he applied to publish his work; every year, Rome refused. Every year, he applied to return to France; every year, Rome refused. At last Rome let him visit France
when he was sixty-five; he had had a heart attack. Still Rome prohibited his publishing. Offered a fine teaching post, he went to Rome in person to seek permission; Rome denied it. He traveled to the United States, to South America, and to Africa, and he visited Paris to spread his ideas by talking. Even when he was seventy-three and dying of heart disease in New York, Rome forbade his publishing, lecturing, and returning to France.

Why did he put up with it? One of his colleagues said he had “the impatience of a prophet.” When did he show impatience? His colleagues and many of his friends urged him to quit the Jesuits. Only for a few weeks, however, did he consider leaving the order. To kick over the traces, he thought, would betray his Christianity. People would think—perish the thought—he was straying from the church! His brother Jesuits defended him and his thinking. Leaving the order would mean, he decided, “the killing of everything I want to liberate, not destroy.” The Catholic church, he wrote late in life, is still our best hope for an arch to God, for the transformation of man, and for making, in his view, evolution meaningful; it is “the only international organization that works.”

He had dedicated his life wholeheartedly, again and again; consequently, he did not complain. When he first learned that Rome banned publication of
The Divine Milieu
, he did, however, allow himself to write a friend in private that it was
“a pity.” The year before he died, while he was declaring in sincere letters that Rome was mankind’s best hope, he also blew off steam, like many a cleric. He wrote a friend, “The sin of Rome is not to believe in a future…. I know it because I have stifled for fifty years in this sub-human atmosphere.” He apparently felt strongly both ways. Later, Vatican II calmly endorsed most of his ideas.

Of the Osage Indians of the North American plains, John Joseph Mathews wrote, “They have adopted the Man on the Cross, because they understand him. He is both Chaso [sky person] and Hunkah [earth person]. His footprints are on the Peyote altars, and they are deep like the footprints of one who has jumped.”

Seventh-century Chinese Chan Buddhist master Hongren advised: “Work, work! … Work! Don’t waste a moment…. Calm yourself, quiet yourself, master your senses. Work, work! Just dress in old clothes, eat simple food…. feign ignorance, appear inarticulate. This is most economical with energy, yet effective.”

“All that is really worthwhile is action,” Teilhard wrote. “Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought.”

C L O U D S
      
       On October 25, 1870 (while Schliemann was beginning to excavate Troy), Gerard Manley Hopkins saw clouds in the sky over England. “One great stack in particular over Pendle was knoppled all over in fine snowy tufts and pencilled with bloom-shadow.” Hopkins had begun a three-year study of philosophy in Lancashire as the second part of his Jesuit novitiate. His journal for those years concentrates on daily clouds and, to a lesser extent, trees.

April 22, 1871: clouds “stepping one behind the other, their edges tossed with bright ravelling.” Hopkins was twenty-seven years old. Who were these individual clouds?

On June 13 of that year, he saw over Whalley a rack of red clouds floating away. “What you look at hard seems to look at you.” Is this true? Or is it one of the many epigrams that merely sound true? I do not think it is true.

July, 1871: “The greatest stack of cloud … I ever can recall seeing. It was in two limbs fairly level above and below, like two waggons or loaded trucks. The left was rawly made … like the ringlets of a ram’s fleece blowing.”

While he was writing this record in his room, he heard “every now and then the deathwatch ticking. It goes for a few seconds at a time.” The deathwatch is only a beetle.

N U M B E R S
      
       What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people? Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? Who told you? What, seriatim, were your sensations? Who did you tell? Did your anguish last days or weeks?

All my life I have loved this sight: a standing wave in the boat’s wake, shaped like a thorn. I have seen it rise from many oceans, and now I saw it on the Sea of Galilee. It was a peak about a foot high. The standing wave broke at its peak, and foam slid down its glossy hollow. I watched the foaming wave on the port side. At every instant, we were bringing this boat’s motor, this motion, into new water. The stir, as if of life, impelled each patch of water to pinch and form this same crest. Each crest tumbled upon itself and released a slide of white foam. The foam’s individual bubbles popped and dropped into the general sea while they were still sliding down the dark wave. They trailed away always, and always new waters peaked, broke, foamed, and replenished.

What I saw was the constant intersection of two wave systems. Lord Kelvin first described it. Transverse waves rise
astern and move away from the boat parallel to its direction of travel. Diverging waves course out in a V shape behind the boat. Where the waves converge, two lines of standing crests persist at an unchanging angle. We think of these as the boat’s wake. I was studying the highest standing wave, the one nearest the boat. It rose from the trough behind the stern and spilled foam. The curled wave crested over clear water and tumbled down. All its bubbles broke, thousands a second, unendingly. I could watch the present; I could see time and how it works.

On a shore, eight thousand waves break a day. James Trefil provides these facts. At any one time, the foam from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth’s surface. This acreage of foam—using the figure 4 percent—is equal to that of the entire continent of North America. By another coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population, in other words, although it is the third-largest population among nations, is about as small a portion of the earth’s people as breaking waves’ white foam is to the planet’s surface. And the whole North American continent occupies no more space than waves’ foam.

“God rises up out of the sea like a treasure in the waves,” wrote Thomas Merton.