The Abundance (21 page)

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 briefly 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, or returning to France.

Why did he put up with it? One of his colleagues said he had “the impatience of a prophet.” When exactly did he show this impatience? His colleagues and many of his friends urged him to quit the Jesuits. Only for a few weeks, however, did he ever 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.”

Again and again he had dedicated his life wholeheartedly to the church: Consequently, he did not much complain. When he first learned that Rome had blocked 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 allowed himself to blow off steam, like many a cleric. “The sin of Rome,” he wrote to a friend, “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.

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

Earth sifts over things as dirt or dust. 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 a 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 11,000 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 that bore it downstream.

The rate at which dirt buries us varies. New York City's street level rises every century. 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 there, 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 2,000 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 blow 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 pollution haze that blurs and dims the world.

We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take,” says Bodanis. Air routinely carries intimate fragments of run, 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 whitecaps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and carried microfragments from tropical forest fires.” These 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, which may, however, wash 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 had to stoop 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've wrecked. By the nineteenth century, archaeologists had to dig through twenty-four feet of earth to find the monuments of the Roman Forum.

In 1870–71 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 New East sank into the ground, settled into soft soils, and decomposed. “Every few years, the priests would have them build 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 risen in its crypt.

In Santa Monica, California, early every morning, a worker in a bulldozer plows 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.

When he entered the war, Teilhard 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 into 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 and sorrow of the world.”

Sand plunges. Sandstone plates subduct. They tilt as if stricken and die under crusts. At abyssal depths the earth's weight presses out their water; heat and weight burst their molecules, and sandstone changes into quartzite. It keeps the form of quartzite—that milky gray mineral—to very great depths, where at last the quartzite melts and mixes into magma. In the fullness of time, magma rises along faults; it surfaces, and makes the continents that streams will one day grate back to sand.

“I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ,” Father Teilhard explained cheerfully at the end of a book in which he tracked his ideas. His evolving universe culminates in Christ symbolically. “As much as anyone, I imagine,” he went on, “I walk in the shadows of faith”—that is, in doubt. Doubt and dedication, after all, go often hand in hand. And “faith” crucially, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in a conscious and rededicated relationship to God. Nevertheless, the temptation to profess creeds with uncrossed fingers is strong. Teilhard possessed, like many spiritual thinkers, a sort of anaerobic capacity to thrive on paradox.