The Abundance (20 page)

September 1923: They rode back into Peking. Their mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in sixty wooden crates. Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”

The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and that spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, “There are only beings, everywhere.”

Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When he was still in college, he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came after this Ordos trip, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia but also through Java, India, and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?

“If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”

Teilhard had glimpsed the Gobi Desert from muleback on his 1923 Ordos expedition. It was the biggest desert on earth: 500,000 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.

In the field Teilhard 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. 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.

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

The more nearly spherical is a grain of sand, the older it is. “The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand one hundred miles,” James Trefil tells us. As a sand grain tumbles along the riverbed—as it saltates, then lies still, then saltates for those millions of years—it smooths some of its rough edges. Sooner or later, it blows into a desert. In the desert, no water buoys its weight. When it leaps, it lands hard. In the desert, it knaps itself round. Most of the round sand grains in the world, wherever you find them, have spent some part of their histories blowing around the desert.

“We live surrounded by ideas and objects infinitely more ancient than we imagine,” Teilhard said, “and yet at the same time everything is in motion.”

Chert, flint, agate, and glassy rock can flake to a cutting edge just a few atoms thick. Prehistoric people made long oval knives of this surpassing sharpness, and made them, wittingly, too fragile to use. Those people—
Homo sapiens
—lived in a subfreezing open-air camp in central France about 18,000 years ago. We call their ambitious
culture Solutrean; it lasted only about 3,000 years. It was they who invented the bow and arrow, the spear thrower, and the needle—which made clothes such a welcome improvement over draped pelts.

Solutrean artisans knapped from rocks astonishing yellow blades in the shape of long, narrow, pointed leaves. Most of these blades are the size and thickness of a fillet of sole. The longest is fourteen inches long, four inches at its beam, and only one-quarter inch thick. Their intricate technique is, according to Douglas Preston, “primarily an intellectual process.” A modern surgeon at Michigan Medical School used such a blade to open a patient's abdomen; it was smoother, he said, than his best steel scalpels. Another scientist estimated a Solutrean chert blade to be one hundred times sharper than a steel scalpel; its edge split few cells, and left scant scar. An Arizona rancher skinned a bear with an obsidian knife in two hours, he said, instead of the usual three and a half; he never even needed to press down.

Hold one of these chert knives to the sky. Most of it shines dull, waxy gold—brown in the center, and yellow toward the edges. At each fractured rim, however, the blade thins from translucency to transparency. You see your skin, and the sky. At its very edge the blade dissolves into the universe at large. It ends, imperceptibly, at an atom.

Each of these delicate, absurd objects takes hundreds of separate blows to make. At each stroke and at each pressure flake, the brittle chert might—and, by the record, very often did—snap. The maker knew he was likely to lose many hours' of breath-holding work at a single tap. The maker worked in extreme cold. He knew no one would ever use the virtuoso blades. He protected them, and his descendants saved them intact, for their very perfection. To any human on earth, the sight of one of them means: Someone thought of making, and made, this difficult, impossible, beautiful thing.

New sand is young and sharp. Some of the sand in a sidewalk crack will cut your finger. The geologist Philip H. Kuenen, who devoted his working life to sand, reckoned, perhaps 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 the next like a hand.

Exposed uplifted sandstone, naturally, can wear away again. A sandstone castle in Austria, 900 years old, is
itself returning to soil. Weathering has turned its outer walls to fine 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 seriously out of whack.

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest 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. The cranks they attracted possibly tempted some possessors of good minds to write him off without reading him.

In France he had taken years of theology courses, 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. To the church, 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 long
ing for France, for his Paris teaching position, the Jesuit brothers, and his friends, and always willing to settle for a life in the United States, he nevertheless discovered gradually that his vow of obedience would require him to renounce the West for twenty-two years more.