Read For the Time Being Online

Authors: Annie Dillard

For the Time Being (2 page)

Do you suffer what a French paleontologist called “the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars”? For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, but for credibility’s sake let’s start with the bad news.

An infant is a pucker of the earth’s thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeasts and break off; we forget our beginnings. A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I have finished swelling; our circling periods are playing out, but we can still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do not know.

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

S A N D
      
      June, 1923: The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on muleback in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of Peking. He saw it from a distance: the Ordos, the Inner Mongolian desert. He saw from the mule what he had often seen in Egypt years before: “the
burnt stones of the desert and the sand of the dunes in the dusk.”

The Ordos is a desert plateau—three thousand feet high, spreading thirty-five thousand square miles—from which mountains rise. The Great Wall separates the Ordos from the fertile lands to the east and south in Shansi and Shensi Provinces.

He was forty-two years old, tall and narrow, fine-featured. He wore a big felt hat, like a cowboy, and heavy boots. Rough weather had cut lines on his face. He had carried stretchers during World War I for a regiment of sharpshooters. His courage at the front—at Ypres, Arras, and Verdun—won him several medals which the surviving men of his regiment requested for him. One of his fellows recalled his “absolute contempt for danger” as he mounted parapets under fire. They shortened his name—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—to Teilhard, “Tay-YAR” in French.

His characteristic expression was simple and natural, according to one scientist, who also noted that his eyes were “filled with intelligence and understanding.” Another colleague described him as “a man of self-effacing and irresistible distinction, as simple in his gestures as in his manners…. His smile never quite turned to laughter…. Anxious to welcome, but like a rock of marble.” From the
back of a jog-trotting mule, he could spot on stony ground a tiny rock that early man had chipped.

On some days in the Ordos, he and his geologist partner dug, excavated, and sifted the ground. On other days they moved in caravan. They rode with two Mongolian soldiers—to fight bandits—and five so-called donkey boys. “On the third day,” he wrote a friend, “we arrived at an immense steppe over which we traveled for more than six days without seeing much else but endless expanses of tall grasses.” He passed the garnet and marble gorges of the Ula-Shan, “the old crystalline shelf of China.”

July, 1923: Teilhard was one of the men who unpacked the expedition’s three donkeys and ten mules for the night. Bandit raids had routed them from the steppes and forced them to enter the badlands. That night he and the others pitched their two white tents in the Ordos massif, within a circle of red earth cliffs. In one red cliff he found, by daylight, the fossil remains of extinct pachyderms from the Pliocene.

“The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world,” he wrote, “are only an illusion.”

The scant rain that reaches the Ordos falls in thunderstorms. During one storm, Teilhard wrote a letter. “Of this part of the journey, the crossing of the Arbous-Ula will remain in my memory as the finest stage. The innumerable
strata of this savage mountain, a forward bastion of the Ula-Shan on the right bank of the Yellow River, bend gently into two long concentric folds which seem to unfurl over the eastern solitudes.”

August, 1923: Once more they pitched their tents in the desert, in a circle of cliffs. Here they camped for a month, in the southeast corner of the Ordos, where the cliffs were gray, yellow, and green. Here the great eroded loess hills met the sands a river laid—the river called Shara-Osso-Gol. And here they found the world’s first evidence of pre-Neanderthal man in China. (People had lived in China long before Neanderthals lived in Europe.) The man of the yellow earths, Teilhard named him, for loess is a fine yellow dust. They found his traces in the Shara-Osso-Gol’s twisted canyon.

First they struck Neanderthal tools ten meters down: scrapers, gravers, quartzite blades. Then they dug through 164 feet of sand before they revealed an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked. Their blackened hearth near the river made a thin layer among cross-bedded dune sands and blue clays. No hominid bones were there, but some tools lay about, and the hearth was indisputable—the first human traces north of the Himalayas.

The people made these fires by this river about 450,000 years ago—before the last two ice ages. During their time,
the Outer Mongolian plateau to the north continued its slow rise, blocking Indian Ocean monsoons; the northern plateau dried to dust and formed the Gobi Desert. The people would have seen dust clouds blow from the north, probably only a few big dust clouds every year. Such dust today! they must have thought. After the people vanished, the dust continued to blow down on their land; it laid yellow and gray loess deposits hundreds of feet deep. Almost forty-five hundred centuries passed, and in 1222 Genghis Khan and his hordes rode ponies over the plateau, over these hundreds of feet of packed loess, over the fecund dust and barren sand, over the animal bones, the chipped blades, and the hearth. Teilhard thought of this, of Genghis Khan and the ponies. “Much later,” he wrote, “Genghis Khan crossed this plain in all the pride of his victories.” At that time the Mongols made stirrups and horseshoes from wild-sheep horns.

Teilhard found a twentieth-century Mongol family living in the Shara-Osso-Gol canyon. Their name was Wanschock. The father and his five sons helped Teilhard excavate during the weeks he camped. The Wanschocks rode horses, kept goats, and lived in a cave scooped out of a cliff in the loess. They taught their toddlers to ride by mounting them on sheep. “The Mongols wear long hair,” Teilhard wrote, “never take off their boots, are never out of the saddle. The Mongol
women look you straight in the eyes with a slightly scornful air, and ride like the men.”

“Throughout my whole life,” he noted later, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”

C H I N A
      
       We were driving that morning in 1982 from the city of Xi’an. We drove through a gate in the city’s rammed-earth walls and followed a paved road into the countryside. A Chinese writer drove the big car. The soil there in central China was a golden loess so fine it was clay.

We were six Americans, mostly writers; we met with Chinese writers and saw some sights. Now in the open countryside I saw corn growing in irrigated fields—regular old field corn—and cauliflower, cotton, and wheat. Loess soils are richly fertile. In the distance we could see rammed-earth village compounds.

We were talking and paying scant attention to the country. For two weeks we had visited writers and toured. What was it we were going to see today? Some emperor’s tomb, the one with the clay soldiers. I had seen magazine photographs of
them: stiff statues of various soldiers. We parked, and laughing about a remark someone had dropped at dinner the night before, we made our way up some wide stairs into a low, modern museum building’s entrance. Inside, we passed some dull display cases and took a side door to what proved to be the whole thing.

There, at the top of the stairs, was the world: acres and miles of open land, an arc of the planet, curving off and lighted in the distance under the morning sky. The building we had just passed through was, it turned out, only the entrance to an open dig, where Chinese archaeologists were in the years-long process of excavating a buried army of life-sized clay soldiers. The first Chinese emperor, Emperor Qin, had sculptors make thousands of individual statues. Instead of burying his army of living men to accompany him in the afterlife—a custom of the time—he interred their full-bodied portraits.

At my feet, and stretching off into the middle distance, I saw nothing resembling an archaeological dig. I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth. Straight trenches cut the bare soil into deep corridors or long pits. From the trench walls emerged an elbow here, a leg and foot there, a head and neck. Everything was the same color, the terra-cotta earth and the people: the color of plant pots.

Everywhere the bodies, the clay people, came crawling from the deep ground. A man’s head and shoulders stuck out
of a trench wall. He wore a helmet and armor. From the breast down, he was in the wall. The earth bound his abdomen. His hips and legs were still soil. The untouched ground far above him, above where his legs must be, looked like any ground: trampled dirt, a few dry grasses. I looked down into his face. His astonishment was formal.

The earth was yielding these bodies, these clay people: it erupted them forth, it pressed them out. The same tan soil that embedded these people also made them; it grew and bore them. The clay people were earth itself, only shaped. The hazards of time had suspended their bodies in the act of pressing out into the air. No one was there; the archaeologists were mysteriously absent, and my friends gone.

Seeing the broad earth under the open sky, and a patch of it sliced into deep corridors from which bodies emerge, surprises many people to tears. Who would not weep from shock? I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity. I seemed long dead and looking down.

A horse’s head and neck broke through sideways, halfway up a wall. Its eyes rolled. Its bent hoof and hind leg broke through, pawing a crooked escape. The soil, the same color as the horse, appeared to have contracted itself to form the horse in a miracle, and was now expelling it.

Far in the distance, beyond the dug trenches, and beyond many planted fields, I saw barely visible people cultivating
the ground. They looked like twigs. Nearby a blackbird landed beside a pit, settled, and pecked a speck.

There, down a sunken corridor, I saw a man swimming through the earth. His head and shoulder and one raised arm and hand shot from the dug wall. His mouth was wide open, as if he were swimming the Australian crawl and just catching a breath. His chin blended into the wall. The rest of him was underground. I saw only the tan pit wall, troweled smooth, from which part of this man’s head and shoulder emerged in all strength and detail, and his armored arm and bare hand. He jutted like exposed pipe. His arm and hand cast a shadow down the straight wall and on the trench floor four feet below him. I could see the many clay mustache hairs his open mouth pulled taut, and beside them I could see his lower lip springing from the dirt wall.

The hot dust smelled like bone, or pie. Overhead, fair-weather cumulus were forming. I had not yet moved.

There were three acres of dug trenches—each sixteen to twenty feet deep. Below in the trenches were warriors in various stages between swimming out of the dirt and standing on it. Here, halfway along a wall, bent bodies like chrysalids were still emerging. At one end of this trench—fully dug out, reassembled, and patched—a clay platoon stood in ranks. These bareheaded men had halted, upright, on a sunken brick floor; my feet were far above the tops of their heads.
Each different, all alert, they gazed forward. Some scowled, and some looked wry. Living people, soldiers from different regions of China, posed for these portraits. The shapes of the heads differed. Behind these stood more whole specimens: six chariots, with a complement of footmen and riders arrayed for war.

At the far end of the same gallery lay great heaps of broken bodies and limbs. A loose arm swung a bronze sword. A muscular knee and foot pushed off from someone else’s inverted head. A great enemy, it looked like, had chunked these men’s vigorous motion to bits. Each tangled heap resembled a mass grave of people who, buried alive, broke themselves into pieces and suffocated in the act of trying to crawl up through one another.

I walked beside a corridor on the ground, which now seemed to be the top of an earthen balk erected senselessly. What were we doing, our generation, up so high? In the middle distance, a test pit lay open. I edged over to it. In the sloshed rubble in the hole, a man’s back floated exposed, armor up, as if he had drowned. No one was near. No one was working anywhere on the site. Deep in another trench, horses four abreast drew a wheeled chariot. Tall honor guards accompanied them. One of the horses tossed its head, and I could see red paint in a raised nostril.

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