The Measure of a Man (18 page)

Could we expect a young man and a young woman coming of age today to reasonably make the kind of commitment my brother and his wife made? What’s the earning power in today’s dollars of a man such as my brother who must work with his hands? What are his prospects? And where today is the stable community that would sustain such a couple, where one can be both poor and dignified and raise one’s children with decency and hope?

Does our society support that kind of courageous commitment? If the answer is education, does our society adequately
provide that tool of self-improvement to the less well off? Between the American mythology of “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and the orthodoxy of entitlements, where’s the enduring commitment for the long haul, the consistent vision of how to weave the less fortunate into a decent and humane society?

I must ask myself what I’ve done to support that vision of the future. I know that one can never do enough. “To whom much is given, much is required” the Bible says, and I give money to this and to that and lend my name to certain causes. But where I’ve invested most in the future of this planet—unreservedly, and from the deep heart’s core—is through the lives of six talented and intelligent young women, truly beautiful human beings, whom I burst with pride to call my daughters.

ON CAT ISLAND, when I was six or seven, I walked the beaches constantly because they weren’t that far from my house. One of the things I always heard on those walks, mixed with the chirping and singing of birds, was the sound of an insect we called a singer (because its screeches sounded like a song). These musical insects were fairly common on the island. You could walk for miles and miles inland or on the beach, and you would hear only the birds and the singers, because there are so few people—just the birds and the singer insects. I remember often walking alone along the beach, listening to the singer insects and searching the nearby coral reefs for stingrays—those great big wonderful, beautiful creatures, so wide it seems as if they have wings.

One day, doing that, I looked upward toward the sky—it was a bright, clear, sunny day—and I saw what looked like something falling into the ocean. I kept looking and there were
more
somethings—and these things kept falling. It looked like a series of objects, and they seemed round, and clear, and quite large, and quite far away. As I followed them down, they landed in the ocean, one by one. Well, after some months, this became a ritual. Whenever I was walking on the beach, I would just look up, and sure as hell there would be these things falling into the ocean. I thought, of course, that they were coming out of the sky, inexplicably, and I wondered what part of the sky they were coming out of and why they were falling into the sea.

When we left Cat Island and went to Nassau, I was no longer near the water all that much, you know? I mean, we were
near
the water in Nassau, but on Cat Island I had gotten up in the morning and
there was the water
. In Nassau things were different,
life
was different, and I had friends and lots of people. I didn’t have time for that kind of contemplative thing, strolling on a beach and looking up at a blue sky and seeing objects fall.

Anyway, it would be years before I realized what those things were. I later discovered that what appeared to be objects falling into the sea were really spots in a film over my eyeballs. When I look against a blue sky now, I know that as the film rolls down, any spots in the film—little cells—look as if they’re far away and falling as they come across my cornea into the pupil.

But by the time I learned this, I had already learned other things. I somehow had been introduced to the stars, though I hadn’t heard the word
galaxy
yet. I hadn’t heard the word
cosmos
yet. I hadn’t even heard the word
astronomy
yet. Still, I had the sense that there was something out there.

When I learned to read fairly well, I started coming across these words frequently, and every time I came upon something about the stars, I would read it. Much of it, of course, was incomprehensible to me, because I didn’t understand the scientific terminology. Somehow, though, I stumbled on the information that a star is a sun, and that there are lots and lots of suns, and that the star we see at night isn’t
just
a star, and that the sun we see in the daytime isn’t
just
a sun, but that both are one and the same. Well, it took me a while to figure that one out. But the fascination grew—the fascination that had started because of the film rolling over my cornea, creating the impression of crystalline globes falling into the sea.

Years later I had the privilege of getting to know Carl Sagan, even being a guest on his television show. We met and we became kind of friendly, and I saw him at the homes of other people after we had met, and he invited me to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

One evening we had dinner at the home of the director of the lab, and from there we went to the facility. Because they were about to begin receiving the first data from the probe around Neptune, there was a large collection of guests, journalists, and scientists, all gathered in this fabulous room. As the information began to come in, it was processed and then
put up on a big screen, and then this chap who was the head of things, he would describe it to the press and to the invited guests, and then Carl would make comments.

Despite his background as a serious scientist, despite all the physics and math he knew, Sagan still had the great capacity to wonder. He was mesmerized by the Saturn discoveries, just as you would have been, or just as I was as a little boy on the beach looking up at the stars. He maintained that sense of wonder throughout his life.

For a long while after he became ill he was still able to move about, he was still on his feet, and they were working and struggling to reverse his illness. Then the time came when they knew that they weren’t going to be able to. He went on
Nightline
, I remember, and he talked about his work and, of course, his physical condition. And a question came up about illness and hope. It was phrased as delicately as possible, but the gist of it was, “What are the thoughts of a dying man, and what exactly comes to mind in terms of religion and the afterlife?”

Carl was a scientist to the end (not that there aren’t scientists who believe in God). He let it be known that his faith was firmly in science, that he believed science would eventually explain much, much more than we know now, and that those forthcoming technical details would be the only answers we’re ever going to have. In other words, he wasn’t looking for a hedge in his time of need. He wasn’t covering his bets.

Well, I’m no scientist, and certainly I don’t have Carl Sagan’s technical understanding of the universe and our position within it. I simply believe that there’s a very organic, immea
surable consciousness of which we’re a part. I believe that this consciousness is a force so powerful that I’m incapable of comprehending its power through the puny instrument of my human mind. And yet I believe that this consciousness is so unimaginably calibrated in its sensitivity that not one leaf falls in the deepest of forests on the darkest of nights unnoticed.

Now, given the immensity of this immeasurable power that I’m talking about, and given its pervasiveness through the universe (extending from distant galaxies to the tip of my nose), I choose not to engage in what I consider to be the useless effort of giving it a name, and by naming it, suggesting that I in any way understand it, though I’m enriched by the language and imagery of both traditional Christianity and old island culture. Many of my fellow human beings
do
give it a name, and
do
purport to understand it in a more precise way than I would ever attempt. I just give it respect, and I think of it as living in me as well as everywhere else.

The grand consciousness I perceive allows me great breadth and scope of choices, none of which are correct or incorrect except on the basis of my own perception. This means that the responsibility for me rests with me.

I have obligations to be in service to this me, to shape it, to encourage its growth, to nurture it toward becoming a better and better me day by day, to be conversant with all its good qualities, such as they are, and to be aware of all its bad qualities, such as they are. When the living space between the two sets of qualities becomes so uncomfortable that choices have to be made, I try to come down on the side of what I feel is right.

I’ll say that I believe in God, if you press me to the wall, but then I’m going to come right back at you and give you the above definition of God. You follow? And that’s the only definition of God that I’ll defend, because I don’t think it’s possible for me to embrace any other.

I have a kind of respect—a
worshipful
attitude, even—for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons. I know it’s no accident that ancient people celebrated the solstice and the equinox. There’s something very powerful that happens, especially in the colder climates of the north, when instead of being a minute shorter every day, daylight lasts a minute longer. You feel it in your bones. You know it as you might know the presence of God. We’re halfway there! We may survive this winter after all!

I don’t believe in a Moses laying down the law; I simply believe that there are natural harmonies, and that some things work better than others—and it so happens that most of those things that work better than others align pretty well with the Judeo-Christian ethics that most people in this country define as morality. They work better, within the system of life on this planet. They don’t violate the natural order.

It’s like the lion in nature. This beast can be as magnificently dreadful a creature as any we could imagine. Come feeding time, lions go out on the plains, and they find food; and before there’s food, there’s death—the death of another creature—and that death is repeated over and over each day.

And yet after the lion’s belly is full, it walks among prey with no harmful intent, and the prey knows it. Everything’s
cool. The lion goes down to the water hole to drink, you know, and a prey creature approaches the water and sees the lion there drinking. The antelope and gazelles know damn full well they’re okay. Some instinct tells them, “Now listen, in the entire history of our species there hasn’t been one of these guys here drinking with us who then attacked us; it’s just not in the cards. So relax.”

There’s simply a certain order in the nature of things, and the animals operate accordingly. The natural laws are there, and the animals respond unfailingly. There are times when humanity operates the same way, in harmony with natural laws—and it’s called
true progress
.

How come we were smart enough, without education or training but entirely on the basis of instinct and experience, to find a way to domesticate agriculture? Instead of having to follow the rains or the herds all the time as we once did, some enterprising soul said, “Wait a minute. You know something? These nuts and these fruit seeds and these grains—hmmm. Let’s try this: let’s put them in the soil.” Then the tribe goes away and comes back nine months later and there’s a field of grain, or a stand of trees.

The whole process of survival tells us that there’s a morality to these natural rhythms, and that this morality is woven into the fabric of nature. For humanity, part of that fabric is the higher consciousness I was speaking of earlier. I feel that to aspire to that higher consciousness is to align ourselves with the natural order—in essence, to let go of the self. When we do this, when we rid ourselves of the petty little ego-drives that
get in our way, we find ourselves much more in tune with the natural harmony, and good things can happen.

In the early sixties, director Ralph Nelson came upon a novel called
Lilies of the Field
, and he was so taken with it that he had an agent pursue the film rights. Then he found a screenwriter, and then he got in touch with me.

United Artists was the studio he went to, because he’d had successful relations with them before, but they weren’t that enthusiastic about doing this small little picture about some nuns and a black handyman and faith and redemption. They were, however, interested in continuing their relationship with Ralph Nelson. The material was probably too soft for them, but in the interests of continuing their relationship, they offered him an outrageously small amount of money to make the film—240 thousand dollars.

That wasn’t his salary. That was the entire budget for the film!
All
salaries,
all
production costs,
everything
.

And Ralph Nelson said yes! He put up his house as collateral, meaning that if he’d run over budget, he might very well have lost the place. We had no money in the budget for rehearsal, so he said to the actors, “We can rehearse, but you have to do it at my house, and we have to do it kind of secretly.” This was because of the union rules and the fact that we weren’t getting paid but were acting on…well, faith.

We rehearsed at his house in California for maybe a week, and then we flew to Arizona, checked into a motel, did the wardrobe thing, and started shooting the next day. Thirteen days later we were finished. Thirteen days later we had shot
the entire film and were back in Los Angeles—from here to there and back again in two weeks.

Well, our faith was amply rewarded. For me, it meant winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. For all of us, it meant being a part of something that continues to touch people now, almost forty years down the road.

That picture had a lot to say about the kind of consciousness I aspire to, a consciousness that encompasses infinitely more than the world I see as I drive through Los Angeles at rush hour. But when the focus is entirely on the traffic, or on the appointment I’m rushing to, or on whatever else my petty problems may include, those manifestations of the ego are like the bright lights of a city that block out the stars. The stars are still there—I just can’t see them.

But when I focus
beyond
the self, the interference drops away and suddenly I have access to a much grander form of awareness. It includes what I see and what I don’t see but know to exist—even what will far outlast me as a physical being. I can begin to sense the connection of it all, and my place within it all, but only by removing myself from the center. In the moment that I do so, I know that this is Los Angeles, and that Los Angeles is part of a state, and that this state is part of the country, and that this country is part of a hemisphere, and that this hemisphere is part of a globe, and that this globe is one of nine or eleven (depending on your point of view) planets that move around the sun, and that the sun is one star, and that one star sits in a galaxy of 200 billion stars, and that this galaxy of 200 billion stars sits in a complex of 200 billion galaxies, and
clusters of galaxies. I can even postulate alternative universes we don’t know about yet. And all this is available to me when I sublimate the self—as is the full saga of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and human experience. When I cling to the self, I feel neurotic, alienated, insecure, It’s when I let the self go that I can begin to realize how fully a part of this grand scheme I am and will always remain.