Soul of the World (16 page)

In New Zealand there is a reclusive, rarely seen nocturnal lizard about the size of an iguana and with the same kind of short dorsal spines. It has a large head and a lovely, delicately spotted skin decorated with misty, irregular stripes of tan and charcoal. This is no lizard, though; it is our only living link to the dinosaurs, and has remained unchanged since the Triassic era, 190 million years ago. It is a member of a family of reptiles, the sphenodontids, that arose at the same time as the dinosaurs. Continental drift marooned New Zealand just as the dinosaurs began to dominate, and the tuataras were left behind on their own island, isolated from the evolutionary and climatic changes that eventually brought about the demise of their cousins.

The oceans also harbour living fossils. Two species of stalked crinoids, identical to the ones that once waved their arms over the shallow oceans of the Paleozoic era, still exist today in the ocean at great depths. And the pearly nautilus of the Pacific, a kind of squid that lives in a coiled shell, is the last surviving member of the ammonites that died out with the dinosaurs. In 1939 the scientific world was astonished at the discovery of another prehistoric relic: a strange-looking plated fish with fins on the ends of rudimentary legs. It turned out to be a coelacanth, a creature virtually identical to its 420-million-year-old forebears, and its discovery was as shocking as if someone had stumbled upon a herd of triceratops.

If fossils are the three-dimensional, physical memories of the mind of evolution, then living fossils are both memory and resurrection. There is poetry here. Since the Muses are the daughters of memory, limestone must be soaked with inspiration. Even so, the past, like Orpheus’s lost love, Euridyce, is locked away in time, the fearsome
Tyrannosaurus rex
, the long-tusked mammoths and the clockwork trilobites. W. H. Auden once wrote a poetic tribute to a fossil trilobite, his version of “alas poor Yorick,” in which he mused upon what kind of world the trilobite once looked upon, and how the same eyes, now stony blind, gaze blankly at our own time. I think that Auden’s resurrection of the lost world of the trilobite comes from the kind of nostalgia I myself am prone to, a nostalgia for the ancient past.

I am also nostalgic for the present, because it is so fleeting. It too will pass, and if the present moment is supreme, if it contains a once-in-a-lifetime happiness or achievement, then how much more poignant is it in light of its impermanence? Even a little moment of happiness (a
petit heureux
, as the French call it) can be saturated with nostalgia, like my idyll with the roses and clouds that summer afternoon in July, now borne away by time.

The summer is waning. This afternoon I drove through Little Italy and saw cardboard crates filled with grapes stacked on the sidewalks in front of grocery stores. It’s harvest time, and household vintners are pressing their grapes. September is the month of wine and corn. After supper I looked over the inventory of my wine cellar and realized that four bottles of red were mature. Like time capsules with expiration dates, they need to be opened and enjoyed. So now I’m going to do what I always do when a number of bottles are ready to drink—I’ll hold a dinner party. It had better be soon, because I like to serve hors d’oeuvres and dessert on my patio, and this weather will not hold much longer. A process set in motion in the past, the bottling and fermentation of a vintage harvested decades ago, dictates my immediate future. All these years, in the cool darkness of my cellar, a slow, complex dance of colloidal tannins, sugars and esterification has gradually transformed the wine. I can hardly wait to open the first bottle and smell that heady bouquet of chocolate, honey, blackberries—and time.

In the carriages of the past you can’t go anywhere.

—
Maxim Gorky

A D
INNER
P
ARTY

Everyone arrived at once. They brought flowers and bread and wine and strawberries and, after leaving their gifts in my kitchen, they went straight out the back door and into the yard. It was a warm, still evening, and though the sun was low in the sky it drenched the trees in a deep golden-pink light. Earlier, in the morning, it had rained, but the weather cleared up by afternoon. I opened a twenty-four-year-old bottle of Chianti Rufina to let it aerate in the kitchen, jammed a corkscrew in my pocket and, carrying a plate of smoked salmon in my left hand and a bottle of Barbaresco in my right, joined my friends outside.

Bruce and Michael were standing on the lawn looking at the banana tree (now more than chest-high), while Anne, Nicole and Sharon sat talking at the table, tearing off pieces of focaccia and dipping them in olive oil. Normally at this time of year, they would be fanning hornets away from their drinks, but even the wasps were co-operating. I had yet to see one, though September marks the highest population
of yellowjacket wasps. (In England, during the height of the Battle of Britain in September 1940, the wasps were so plentiful that they spoiled the country outings of many Britons who tried to have picnics as they watched the aerial combat of German and British fighters.) I poured out the Barbaresco and carried two glasses over to Bruce and Michael. I was proud of my garden, which was still at its peak.

Both men were skeptical when I told them the banana tree would survive the winter, at least according to the little brochure that came with it. “Can you eat the bananas?” Michael asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think they’re only ornamental. We’ll see about both things, I guess.” We talked a while longer, then rejoined the others at the table.

The Barbaresco went quickly, so I retrieved the Chianti from the kitchen and took it outside. The sun had just set and the sky was turning a lucid turquoise green. “Look, a hummingbird!” Nicole exclaimed. She pointed towards the mandevilla vine. There, like a tiny miracle, a ruby-throated hummingbird hovered and darted among the pink blossoms. Its iridescent throat glowed like an ember, and we could hear the hum of its wings. Then, like an arrow, it zoomed off.

There wasn’t the slightest breeze. The smoke from Michael’s cigarette hung blue in the air, wafting upwards in languorous arabesques. It was a magical evening, full of the energy of good friends in good spirits. I decided to use the vintage of the bottle, 1981, as a conversation starter. After I poured out the wine and we had each had a sip, I asked everyone to recount something remarkable they did during the year of the vintage. We used the bottle like a time capsule, releasing what it had captured in a long-ago summer.

Bruce volunteered to go first. He had been in a rock ‘n’ roll band that year, and he soon had us laughing at his wry anecdotes about concerts and buses and weird venues in small towns. Nicole went next. Nineteen-eighty-one had been her first year in Paris, where, during
the summer, she had been spotted by a fashion designer and asked to model. Michael told us about his first one-man exhibition of photographs in New York City. Of all of us, he seemed the most nostalgic, sighing that he was better known in almost any country other than his own. Sharon had been a member of a performance-art troupe that year. They enacted stylized, slow-motion tableaux on the themes of bondage and liberation at alternative art galleries in downtown Toronto. In 1981, Anne recounted, she met the man who would become her second husband.

Under the stars we repeated the same ritual throughout the evening, each vintage yielding more memories and anecdotes, while moths circled my floodlights. It was as if, by opening the bottles, I was liberating the genies of our earlier, more splendid selves.

T
IME
C
APSULES

That night, as I dropped the wine corks and pieces of tinfoil and cheese rinds into a plastic garbage bag, I realized that I was constructing another time capsule, only this one was more like a piece of concept art. My collection of refuse was unique: a one-time assemblage of found art that I was hermetically sealing in plastic to be picked up and taken to a landfill site, where it would be buried so deeply that oxygen wouldn’t be able to penetrate the bag, ensuring the preservation of the evening’s particular detritus for decades, possibly centuries.

I mused that everything is a time capsule of sorts, anything that has any past, because it bears the stamp of its vintage throughout its whole existence. My kitchen table was made decades ago, it hasn’t changed since then, and my cutlery is at least fifteen years old. Yet here they are, while the peonies that blossomed in my garden are gone, and the
fledgling falcon is now an adult. That which is ephemeral seems most likely to be a prisoner of the past. Even the seemingly changeless things around us change: civilizations rise and fall, though pockets (Pompeii, Tutankhamen’s tomb) are sometimes preserved like snapshots of history. But the concept of sealed cylinders containing memorabilia and messages meant for citizens of the future—time capsules proper—are an invention of the twentieth century.

The first time capsule was designed by Westinghouse and buried in a special wall during the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Like a windfall for future archeologists, time capsules are meant to explain, illustrate and preserve for posterity our way of life, our culture and civilization. In that sense they are like passive time machines launched on a one-way journey into time with their votive collections of the everyday. They are an act of faith, faith that humanity will still be around centuries hence, and faith that the citizens of the future will be as interested in their past as we are in our own. Time capsules are like a note in a bottle, only the ocean the time capsule floats on is time.

There was something bullet-like about the sleek, cylindrical shape of the time capsule that Westinghouse fabricated for the New York World’s Fair. It looked a little like a rocket, which it was, in the sense that time capsules are like artillery shells fired into the future, with the earth or concrete in which the capsule is buried acting as the barrel and the flow of time itself as the explosive charge. Even the metal skin that surrounded the contents of the Westinghouse capsule, separating them as it did from the present, seemed to place them in the anteroom of the future.

Because Westinghouse invented the concept, it also established the standard for what to put inside a time capsule. What would interest
the archeologists of posterity? The company decided to group the objects in categories such as “Small Articles of Common Use,” “Textiles and Materials” and “Miscellaneous Items.” The list of contents was preposterously long—some hundred things, including an alarm clock, a fountain pen, safety pins, a slide rule, a watch, a makeup kit, children’s toys, a package of cigarettes, a deck of cards, a chunk of stainless steel and asbestos, a package of various seeds, and money in coins and bills. There was also a microfilm library (although the celluloid that the microfilm was printed on will last only a hundred years at best) that contained novels, magazines, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and a record of the history of art and science up to that point. How they fit so much into a cylinder measuring seven feet long by four inches in diameter is an achievement in itself.

A fountain pen, a watch, a nail file—how whimsical and sentimental, like the favourite furniture and jewellery that accompanied Egyptian royalty into their tombs. It’s poignant, this fascination we have with surviving mortality by communicating with our distant descendants. Yet for all that, the future is still unknown, still possibly treacherous. Only the past is fixed. As the British essayist Sir Max Beerbohm once commented, “The past is a work of art, free of irrelevance and loose ends.” When we bury time capsules we acknowledge that we will exist in someone else’s past, and what seems so malleable now, the choices we make, the uncertainties we face, will become absolutely fixed in a past with no “loose ends.”

T
HE
B
EGINNING OF
T
IME

There is an extraordinary painting by Paul Gauguin, from his Tahitian period, hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. More like a
mural than a single composition, it is almost three times as wide as it is high. The overall colour is a lush blue-green, and at first impression it seems more like an aquarium set into the wall than a painting. Dominating the centre is the almost naked figure of a young man or woman in a loincloth. The figure’s toes extend close to the bottom frame, and his or her clasped hands reach to the top. On either side of the central figure, which divides the painting into two halves, are groups of the Tahitian beauties we are familiar with from Gauguin’s other paintings of this period. We are likewise familiar with the sort of individuals who people the background. But there are some uncharacteristic elements.

In the extreme lower left-hand corner is a very old Tahitian, sitting with his head clutched in an attitude of despair. Opposite him, on the lower right side, is a baby lying peacefully on the grass. There are also dogs and kittens, and to the left of the central figure, an enigmatic votive figure, turquoise-hued, like an upright Buddha. The landscape is of a paradise—trees, mountains and a placid tropical ocean.

This painting, perhaps Gauguin’s most mystical, is a chronicle of the human life cycle. Despite the benign, mild climate of this South Pacific Eden, or perhaps because of it, Gauguin was brought nearer to the ultimate truths of existence than he had ever been before. In the upper left-hand corner of the painting he wrote its title:
D’ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons nous?
(“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”) If ever an artist grappled with cosmology, the origins of the universe and, ultimately, ourselves, it was Gauguin with this work. Here on the shores of the South Pacific, among the simple lives of the Tahitians, he sought to pose the mystery of existence.

T
HE
R
ING OF
E
TERNITY

A little over thirty years after Gauguin painted his masterpiece in Tahiti, the astronomer Edwin Hubble became director of an observatory that housed the largest telescope on earth—the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. It sat atop a mountain that was part of the same massif that spawned the bristlecone pines to the north. Like Gauguin, Hubble wondered where we came from, though for Hubble that question was linked to the larger question of where the universe came from. So, every night, he looked at the stars. But not just any stars. He preferred very, very distant collections of stars, which at the time were referred to as nebulae—we now call them galaxies. And Hubble knew he was looking not only farther than any human had before, he was also looking back in time.

Two years into his work at San Diego’s Palomar Observatory, Hubble found himself confronting an enigma. There was a problem with some of the data, something didn’t make any sense. It had to do with the way the galaxies were moving. It was wrong. Years earlier, astronomers had learned how to measure exactly how far away these inconceivably distant objects were. They had also discovered a way to determine which way a star was moving relative to the earth. It had to do with subtle variations in the speed of light: if a star was moving towards the earth, its spectrum “shifted” towards the colour blue; if it was moving away from the earth, its spectrum shifted towards red. The thing that perplexed Hubble was that the farther away a galaxy was from the earth, the more its light seemed to shift towards the red, which meant that all distant galaxies, no matter where he looked in the night sky, were accelerating away from earth. Hubble was more than mystified. If what he was seeing was true, then the planet earth, in a bizarre reversal of
Copernicus’s discovery, was the repulsive centre of the whole universe. How could that be? Maybe there was something wrong with the optics of the giant telescope. Maybe his math wasn’t right.

Hubble pondered this mystery for months until, in a flash of insight, he recalled a theory he had read in an article two years earlier. Written by a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître, the article proposed that our universe started some billions of years ago with the explosion of a primeval atom. Hubble had an epiphany. He realized that here, in Lemaître’s hypothesis, was a perfect solution to what seemed to be a contradiction. There was nothing wrong with his math or his observations. The universe
was
expanding, and it was doing so evenly and prodigiously. Earth wasn’t at the centre of the expanding universe; it only seemed to be because every point in the universe was moving away from every other point, like raisins in rising bread dough. And if the universe was expanding outwards in this way, it must have at some point been much, much smaller. Running the universe backwards in time, Hubble understood that there was only one, inescapable conclusion: the universe
had
begun in a tremendous explosion, a “Big Bang,” as the Russian physicist George Gamow later called it in 1948.

Thirty-five years after Hubble’s discovery, in 1964, Bell Laboratories contracted two communication specialists named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson to try to improve microwave telecommunications signals by reducing background static. It seemed, at first, like a simple task. They were able to screen out almost every type of external noise they heard—radio noise, static electricity and even solar-flare static. But there was one type of noise that they just couldn’t seem to get rid of. They tried everything to eradicate it, even cleaning the bird droppings off their antennae, yet the noise persisted. Anywhere or any time they
pointed the antennae into the sky, the results were the same. In desperation, they called an astrophysicist at Princeton, who conjectured that maybe they were picking up background radiation from the universe itself.