He had already spared some thought for death’s big blank by the time he was thirteen. It was then that he drafted seven hundred thousand men to start building his mausoleum, an underground palace he hoped to illuminate like the colorful earth above, using long-burning whale-oil lamps. Workers dug through three underground streams and carved a wide vault, in which they formed and painted a miniature world. On the ceiling above the emperor’s ready copper coffin, they painted the heavens and set constellations. The Milky Way, the source of the Yellow River, they daubed in dots. From the stars the Yellow River fell. Quicksilver in rivulets mimicked the Yellow and all the realm’s great rivers; the liquid actually flowed, mechanically, and emptied into a model of the gleaming ocean. Artists built palaces and towers to scale. They rigged automatic crossbows to shoot grave robbers. They pasted jewels over everything.
Many years later, Emperor Qin died. During his funeral, while his pallbearers threaded the maze of the tomb to the hidden sepulchre, soldiers outside sealed the great jade door. They buried the pallbearers alive because they alone (who had possibly lost a civil service lottery) knew a way into the tomb’s depths. They heaped dirt over the whole mausoleum, jade door and all. Then they planted a grassy orchard so the tumulus looked like a hill.
You do not find the dead emperor of China something of a clown, do you, because he liked it here and wanted to stay? Because he loved, say, the loam but did not care to join it?
The dying generations, Yeats called the human array, the very large array. We turn faster than disks on a harrow, than blades on a reaper. Time: You can’t chock the wheels. We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, the people is grass. We lay us out in rows; hay rakes gather us in. Chinese peasants sow and reap over the emperor’s tomb—generations of them, those Chinese peasants! I saw them, far away. The plow turns under the Chinese peasants where they stand in the field like stalks. Any traveler to any land remarks it: They live like that endlessly, over there. Generation after generation of them lives and dies, over there.
Digging last week in the backyard of our house—in the fresh grass at the cutting edge of the present in a changed wind, under that morning’s clouds—a worker and I surprised two toy soldiers eight feet down.
The early Amish in this country used to roll their community’s dead bodies in wraps of sod before they buried them. We are food, like rolled sandwiches, for the Greek god Chronos, time, who eats his children.
Albert Goldbarth: “Let the Earth stir her dead.”
The Scotch-Irish in the Appalachians once buried their dead with a platter of salt on their stomachs, signifying the soul’s immortality. A rich and long-gone people, I read once, buried their dead after lifting their tongues and dropping jewels into the hollows. The reason for this is unknown.
Mao Tse-tung took novocaine injections to prolong life and virility. His wife, the notorious Jiang Qing, similarly took blood transfusions from—according to Mao’s doctor—“healthy young soldiers.” Like Emperor Qin, Mao believed that the best immortality elixir was the secretion of women’s bodies. The more he dipped into this wellspring, the longer he would live, so he dipped.
As his fears grew, Mao kept moving—within his secret palace and all over the country. When he hopped a train, all traffic on that line halted; his passage fouled rail schedules for a week. Soldiers cleared all the stations, and security guards dressed up to pose as vendors. When Mao slept, the train stopped. He was addicted to barbiturates. He thought someone poisoned one of his swimming pools. He thought someone else poisoned a Nanchang guesthouse where he stayed.
“Jade water,” the Aztecs called human blood. They fed it—hundreds of living sacrifices a day—to the sun. This, the only nourishment the sun god would take, helped him battle the stars. Daily, blood worked its magic: Daily, morning overcame night. The Aztecs likely knew, as the old Chinese knew, the unrelated oddity that dissolving bodies stain jade; jade absorbs bodies’ fluids in rusty, bloody-looking spots.
On the day of the dead, according to Ovid, the Romans sacrificed to a goddess who was mute: Tacitas. She was a fish with its mouth sewn shut.
C L O U D S One day in January, 1942, just after the United States entered World War II, men and women in Athens saw from the base of the Acropolis an “immense structure of cumulus cloud rising out of the Peloponnese.” To the east lay “an undercloud, floating like a detached lining.” Does it matter to you, or to the world of time, which of the two you feel yourself to resemble, the “immense structure” or the “undercloud”?
“The world is God’s body,” Teilhard said. “God draws it ever upwards.”
How to live? “The only worthwhile joy,” Teilhard wrote in one of his thoughtful, outrageous pronouncements, is “to release some infinitesimal quantity of the absolute, to free one fragment of being, forever.” Living well is “cooperating as one individual atom in the final establishment of a world: and ultimately nothing else can mean anything to me.” Is either—releasing a bit of the absolute, or cooperating to establish a world—preferable, or enough, or too much?
On the northeastern coast of Trinidad, during an afternoon in the 1950s, Archie Carr, the green-turtle biologist, lay in a hammock and watched “little round wind clouds” over the Caribbean Sea and “towering pearly land clouds” over Tobago.
N U M B E R S Another dated wave: In northeast Japan, a seismic sea wave killed 27,000 people on June 15, 1896. Do not fail to distinguish this infamous day from April 30, 1991, when typhoon waves drowned 138,000 Bangladeshi.
On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people—likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus—walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago—before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked: it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three’s steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. “A remote ancestor,” Leakey said, “experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.
After archaeologists studied this long strip of ground for several years, they buried it to save it. Along one preserved portion, however, new tree roots are already cracking the footprints, and in another place winds threaten to sand them flat; the preservers did not cover them deeply enough. Now they are burying them again.
After these three hominids walked in the rain, an interval of decades, centuries, thousands of years, and millions of years passed before Peking man and other erectus people lived on earth. That stretch of time lasted eight times longer than the few hundred thousand years between Peking man’s time and ours. Exactly halfway into the interval (1.8 million years ago), recent and controversial dating puts Homo erectus in Java.
Jeremiah, walking toward Jerusalem, saw the smoke from the Temple’s blaze. He wept; he saw the blood of the slain. “He put his face close to the ground and saw the footprints of sucklings and infants who were walking into captivity” in Babylon. He kissed the footprints.
Who were these individuals? Who were the three who walked together and left footprints in the rain? Who was the gilled baby—the one with the waggly tail? Who was the Baal Shem Tov, who taught, danced, and dug clay? He survived among the children of exiles whose footprints on the bare earth Jeremiah kissed. Centuries later, Emperor Hadrian destroyed another such son of exile, Rabbi Akiva, in Rome. Russian Christians and European Christians alike tried to wipe all those survivors of children of exile from the ground of the earth as a man wipes a plate—survivors of exiles whose footprints on the ground we might well kiss, and whose feet.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others. A newborn slept in a shell of aluminum foil; a Dutchman watched a crab in the desert; a punch-drunk airport skycap joined me for a cigarette. And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
Which of all these people are still alive? You are alive; that is certain. We living men and women address one another confident that we share membership in the same elite minority club and cohort, the now-living. As I write this I am still alive, but of course I might well have died before you read it. The Dutch traveler has likely not yet died his death, nor the porter. The baked-potato baby is probably not yet pushing up daisies. The one you love?
The Chinese soldiers who breathed air posing for their seven thousand individual clay portraits must have thought it a wonderful difference, that workers buried only their simulacra then, so their sons could bury their flesh a bit later. One wonders what they did in the months or years they gained. One wonders what one is, oneself, up to these days.
Was it wisdom Mao Tse-tung attained when—like Ted Bundy, who defended himself by pointing out that there are “so many people”—he awakened to the long view?
“China has many people,” Mao told Nehru in 1954. “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of…. The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: He boasted that he was “willing to lose 300 million people”—then, in 1957, half of China’s population.
An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account: it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
I S R A E L In St. Anne’s Basilica in Jerusalem, the plain stones magnified hymns in every tongue, all day, every day. Four people faltering at song sounded like choirs of all the dead souls on earth exalted.
Often in a church I have thought that while there is scant hope for me, I can ask God to strengthen the holiness of all these good people here—that man, that woman, that child … and I do so. In St. Anne’s Basilica it struck me in the middle of a white-robed priest’s French service that possibly everybody in that stone chamber, and possibly everybody in every other house of prayer on earth, thinks this way. What if we are all praying for one another in the hope that the others are holy, when we are not? Of course this must be the case. Then—again possibly—surely it adds up to something or other?
E N C O U N T E R S In Cana lived a Palestinian merchant who gave wine to all comers. “Wine for everyone,” he cried into the street. “On the house.” He wore an open jacket and a blue shirt buttoned to the top. He brandished a silver tray full of tiny wineglasses. My friends would not enter his shop. They thought it was a trick. It was a trick: Put a man through life for sixty years and he is generous to strangers. I took a glass of red wine from the silver tray and drank it down. In my ordinary life, I don’t drink wine. Fine: This man was supposed to be selling souvenirs to tourists, which he was not doing, either. We ignored his merchandise. Leaning in his open doorway, we talked; we traded cigarettes and smoked.
Across the steep street we saw the church at Cana, built where John’s gospel says Christ turned water into wine for a wedding. Then, in the late 1990s, he was one of 130,000 Palestinian Christians in the Galilee. Those I met were a highly educated bunch. Now almost all have fled into exile.
The shopkeeper had no beard; white strands lighted the black hair at his temples. He was content to look me in the eye and converse about the world—a trait one finds among the world’s most sophisticated people, like this shopkeeper, and also among the world’s most unsophisticated people. Tribal Yemenis reaping barley in their high mountain villages understand faces too, and caboclo men and women killing chickens in the Ecuadoran Oriente along the Río Napo, Nicaraguans fishing over the Costa Rican border, Inuit shooting geese at the edge of the Bering Sea, and Marquesas Islanders eating breadfruit in the Pacific. People whose parents were perhaps illiterate read strangers’ eyes—you can watch them read yours—and learn what they need to know. It does not take long. They understand that grand coincidence brings us together, upright and within earshot, in this flickering generation of human life on this durable planet—common language or not, sale or no sale—and therefore to mark the occasion we might as well have a little cigarette.
They settle in comfortably to talk, despite any outlandish appearance. This happens among people who have never clapped eyes on a tall woman, or a bareheaded woman, or a barefaced woman, or a pale-haired woman, or a woman wearing pants, or a woman walking alone; these wise men and women discard all that in a glance, and go for the eyes.
A Roman Catholic priest passed, and the shopkeeper called out, “Come sta?” They conversed in Italian. Why Italian? I asked later. “Oh, we all speak many languages here. Actually, that priest is from Holland.”
Do you think I don’t know cigarettes are fatal?
T H I N K E R The paleontologist Teilhard, according to his biographer Robert Speaight, “was not very much bothered by ‘who moved the stone.’”
“We are Christians,” he wrote deadpan in a 1936 letter, “in a somewhat renovated manner.” A modern abbot, Abbé Paul Grenet, quoted this in a 1965 biography—Nihil Obstat, Imprimatur—which describes Teilhard as always faithful to his calling and to the Order of Jesuits.
In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil, that connoisseur of affliction, lists four “evidences of divine mercy here below”: The experience of God is one; the radiance and compassion of some who know God are another; the beauty of the world makes a third. “The fourth evidence”—nice and dry, this—“is the complete absence of mercy here below.” This introduction of startling last-minute evidence requires two takes from the reader and one footnote from the writer: “NOTE: It is precisely in this antithesis, this rending of our souls, between the effects of grace within us and the beauty of the world around us, on the one hand, and the implacable necessity which rules the universe on the other, that we discern God as both present to man and as absolutely beyond all human measurement.”
Life’s cruelty joins the world’s beauty and our sense of God’s presence to demonstrate who we’re dealing with, if dealing we are: God immanent and transcendent, God discernible but unknowable, God beside us and wholly alien. How this proves his mercy I don’t understand.
Some writers have given describing Being a shot. Hisham ibn Hakim, a Muslim theologian of a minority school, wrote: “Allah has a body, defined, broad, high and long, of equal dimensions, radiating with light… in a place beyond place, like a bar of pure metal.”
What does indestructible “Buddha-nature” look like? “Like the orb of the sun, its body luminous, round and full, vasty and boundless.” So said seventh-century Chan master Hongren, in his Treatise on the Supreme Vehicle. (He added, as if Platonically, that it resides in the bodies of all beings, “but because it is covered by the dark clouds of the five clusters, it cannot shine, like a lamp inside a pitcher.”)
Hegel wrote a letter to Goethe in which he referred to the “oyster-like, gray, or quite black Absolute.”
E V I L Who is dead? The Newtonian God, some call that tasking and antiquated figure who haunts children and repels strays, who sits on the throne of judgment frowning and figuring, and who with the strength of his arm dishes out human fates, in the form of cancer or cash, to 5.9 billion people—to teach, dazzle, rebuke, or try us, one by one, and to punish or reward us, day by day, for our thoughts, words, and deeds.
“The great Neolithic proprietor,” the paleontologist called him, the God of the old cosmos, who was not yet known as the soul of the world but as its mage. History, then, was a fix.
And God was
a Lego lord. People once held a “Deuteronomic” idea of God, says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. God intervened in human affairs “without human agency.” (In Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, one character wonderfully accuses another of replacing “the God of the Dominicans, who was a butcher, with the God of the Romantics, who is an upholsterer.”)
The first theological task, Paul Tillich said fifty years ago, by which time it was already commonplace, is to remove absurdities in interpretation.
It is an old idea, that God is not omnipotent. Seven centuries have passed since Aquinas wrote that God has power to effect only what is in the nature of things. Leibniz also implied it; working within the “possible world” limits God’s doings. Now the notion of God the Semipotent has trickled down to the theologian in the street. The paleontologist in his day called the belief that we suffer at the hands of an omnipotent God “fatal,” remember, and indicated only one escape: to recognize that if God allows us both to suffer and to sin, it is “because he cannot here and now cure us and show himself to us”—because we ourselves have not yet evolved enough. Paul Tillich said in the 1940s that “omnipotence” symbolizes Being’s power to overcome finitude and anxiety in the long run, while never being able to eliminate them. (Some theologians—Whitehead’s school—rescue the old deductive idea of God by asserting that God possesses all good qualities to an absolute degree, therefore he must be absolutely sensitive, and so absolutely vulnerable. They could not have known then that this made God sound like a sensitive new-age guy. At any rate, subjecting our partial knowledge of God to the rigors of philosophical inquiry is, I think, an absurd, if well-meaning, exercise.)