For the Time Being

For the time being.

by Annie Dillard.

FOR LEE SMITH.

The legend of the Traveler appears in every civilization, perpetually a.s.suming new forms, afflictions, powers, and symbols. Through every age he walks in utter solitude toward penance and redemption.

Should I mark more than shining hours?

I have agreed to paint a narrative on the city walls.

I have now been at work many years, there is so much to be told.

-EVAN S. CONNELL, JR.

Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel.

CHAPTER ONE.

B I R T H I have in my hands the standard manual of human birth defects. Smith"s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation, fourth edition, by Kenneth Lyons Jones, M.D., professor of pediatrics at UC-San Diego, 1988, is a volume to which, in conscience, I cannot recommend your prolonged attention. In vivid photographs, it depicts many variations in our human array.

This photograph shows, for example, the bird-headed dwarfs. They are a brother and sister; they sit side by side on a bed. The boy a blond, is six years old, says the caption, and the girl, brown-haired, is three. Indeed their smooth bodies and clear faces make them look, at first and second glances, to be six and three years old. Both are naked. They have drawn their legs up to their chests. The camera looks down on them. The girl has a supercilious expression, and seems to be looking down her nose at the camera. Bright children often show this amused and haughty awareness: "And who might you be, Bub?"

The girl"s nose is large, her eyes are large, her forehead recedes a bit, and her jaw is small. Her limbs are thin but not scrawny. Her thoughtful big brother looks quite like her. His nose is big. His eyes are enormous. He gazes off to the side, as if wishing he were somewhere else, or reflecting that this camera session will be over soon. His blond hair, cut rather Frenchily in layers, looks ruffled from playing.

"Friendly and pleasant," the text says of bird-headed dwarfs; they suffer "moderate to severe mental deficiency." That is, the bird-headed dwarf girl whose face I read as showing amused and haughty awareness may, I hope, have been both aware and amused in her life, but she was likely neither haughty nor bright. The cerebrum of both the boy and the girl is faulty. The cerebrum shows a "simple primitive convolutional pattern resembling that of a chimpanzee." They have only eleven pairs of ribs apiece; they cannot straighten their legs; like many bird-headed dwarfs, they have displaced hips. Others have displaced elbows. "Easily distracted," the text says.

The stunning thing is the doctor"s hand, which you notice at third glance: It shows the children in scale. The doctor"s hand props the boy up by cupping his shoulders-both his shoulders-from behind. The six-year-old"s back, no longer than the doctor"s open hand, is only slightly wider than a deck of cards. The children"s faces are the length of the doctor"s thumb. These people have, as a lifelong symptom, "severe short stature." The boy is the size of an eleven-month-old infant; the girl is the size of a four-month-old infant. If they live and grow, and get their hips fixed, they can expect to reach a height of about three feet. One bird-headed dwarf lived to be seventy-five years old, no taller than a yardstick.

And friendly and pleasant, but easily distracted. There is a lot to be said for children who are friendly and pleasant. And you-are you easily distracted yourself, these days?

If your child were a bird-headed dwarf, mentally deficient, you could carry him everywhere. The bird-headed dwarfs and all the babies in Smith"s manual have souls, and they all can-and do-receive love and give love. If you gave birth to two bird-headed dwarfs, as these children"s mother did-a boy and a girl-you could carry them both everywhere, all their lives, in your arms or in a basket, and they would never leave you, not even to go to college.

The Talmud specifies a certain blessing a man says when he sees a person deformed from birth. All the Talmudic blessings begin "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our G.o.d, King of the Universe, who ..." The blessing for this occasion, upon seeing a hunchback or a midget or anyone else deformed from birth, is "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our G.o.d, King of the Universe, WHO CHANGES THE CREATURES."

A chromosome crosses or a segment snaps, in the egg or the sperm, and all sorts of people result. You cannot turn a page in Smith"s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation without your heart"s pounding from simple terror. You cannot brace yourself. Will this peculiar baby live? What do you hope? The writer calls the paragraph describing each defect"s effects, treatment, and prognosis "Natural History." Here is a little girl about two years old. She is wearing a dress with a polka-dot collar. The two sides of her face do not meet normally. Her eyes are far apart, and under each one is a nostril. She has no nose at all, only a no-man"s-land of featureless flesh and skin, an inch or two wide, that roughly bridges her face"s halves. You pray that this grotesque-looking child is mentally deficient as well. But she is not. "Normal intelligence," the text says.

Of some vividly disfigured infants and children-of the girl who has long hair on her cheeks and almost no lower jaw, of the three-fingered boy whose lower eyelids look as if he is pulling them down to scare someone, of the girl who has a webbed neck and elbows, "rocker-bottom" feet, "sad, fixed features," and no chin-the text says, "Intelligence normal. Cosmetic surgery recommended."

Turn the page. What could cosmetic surgery do for these two little boys? Their enormous foreheads bulge like those of cartoon aliens; their noses are tiny and pinched, the size of rose thorns; and they lack brows, lashes, and chins. "Normal intelligence."

Of G.o.d, the Kabbalah a.s.serts: Out of that which is not, He made that which is. He carved great columns from the impalpable ether.

Here is one fine smiling infant. Why is a fine smiling infant pictured in this manual? You must read it. The infant does indeed present the glad sight of a newborn baby, but it will develop oddly. Note the tight fist-the expert in the manual points it out to the attending pediatrician-and observe the tiny pit in the skin just before the ear, or the loose skin at the back of the neck. Observe the "thin spa.r.s.e hair," "small nose," and subtly small fingernails. What baby, you cry, lacks these features?

These particular babies look normal, or very, very close to normal-close, but no cigar. "Average IQ 50," the text says, or "30." Of Hurler syndrome babies, who are very short, with claw hands, cloudy corneas, short necks, and coa.r.s.e features: "These patients are usually placid ... and often loveable. Death usually occurs in childhood."

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

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 gra.s.ses." He pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sif, 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: sc.r.a.pers, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.ses. 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 c.u.mulus 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, rea.s.sembled, 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 ma.s.s 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.

There is at least this one extraordinary distinction of our generation: For it is in our lifetimes alone that people can witness the unearthing of the deep-dwelling army of Emperor Qin-the seven thousand or the ten thousand soldiers, their real crossbows and swords, their horses and chariots. (The golden smithies of the emperor!) Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.

We alone can watch workers comb soil from bodies and wash their rigid faces, clean their fingernails. We can witness live workers digging bodies from soil and baring them to the light for the first time in 2,200 years. We can see a half-dug horse, whose lower jaw dips into the ground as if the planet were a feed bag. We can talk to the commune members who, in 1973, were digging a well here-by hand-when shovels rang against something hard in this soft land without stones. The well diggers sc.r.a.ped away the dirt, then looked down the well hole at an unblinking human face. The area now under excavation is larger than most American counties.

The average height of a clay infantryman is five feet nine inches, while the average height of a member of the honor guards is six feet two inches. One infantry general is six feet four inches. A translation of the words of the Buddha refers to man as a fathom high: "In truth I say to you that within this fathom-high body ... lies the world and the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world."

"In the pictures of the old masters," Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, "people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves."

There is now, living in New York City, a church-sanctioned hermit, Theresa Mancuso, who wrote recently, "The thing we desperately need is to face the way it is."

When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, "his hands are clenched as though to say, "Everything is mine. I will inherit it all." When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, "I have acquired nothing from the world.""

Confucius wept. Confucius, when he understood that he would soon die, wept.

C L O U D S We people possess records, like gravestones, of individual clouds and the dates on which they flourished.

In 1824, John Constable took his beloved and tubercular wife, Maria, to Brighton beach. They hoped the sea air would cure her. On June 12 he sketched, in oils, squally clouds over Brighton beach. The gray clouds lowered over the water in failing light. They swirled from a central black snarl.

In 1828, as Maria Constable lay dying in Putney, John Constable went to Brighton to gather some of their children. On May 22 he recorded one oblique bluish cloud riding high and messy over a wan sun. Two thin red clouds streaked below. Below the clouds he painted disconnected people splashed and dotted over an open, wide coast.

Maria Constable died that November. We still have these dated clouds.

The Mahabharata says, "Of all the world"s wonders, which is the most wonderful?

"That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die."

N U M B E R S I find the following three approaches to the mystery of human numbers hilarious. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not comprehend the fuss. What was the big deal? David von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: "I mean, there are so many people."

One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, discovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged perfectly tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England"s Lake District.

Recently, in the Peruvian Amazon region, a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, "Isn"t it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?"

I S R A E L In Upper Galilee lies the mountainside town of Safad. In the sixteenth century, Torah scholars, poets, mystical philosophers, ethicists, and saints lived there. Chief among these was Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose thinking on G.o.d and the human soul altered Jewish thought forever. Luria"s views molded those of the eighteenth-century Ukrainian peasant called the Baal Shem Tov, who founded modern Hasidism. For twenty-five years, with increasing admiration, I have studied these people: gloomy Luria because he influenced the exuberant Baal Shem Tov, and the Baal Shem Tov because he and his followers knew G.o.d, and a thing or two besides.

Now here I was in Safad, Luria"s place: a bit of an artists" summer colony now, where secular sabras share the cool cobblestone lanes with black-hatted Orthodox Jews and Hasids. I saw in the heights beside me Mount Meron. There, legend has it, the text of the Kabbalist cla.s.sic the Zohar (or Book of Splendor) "came down" to a holy man who lived in a cave.

Rabbi Luria and the Safad sages were the great Kabbalists, the community of the devout. Often they fasted; they prayed three times in the synagogue by day, and prayed again at one in the morning. To the poor, they gave two-tenths of their income, though most were themselves poor men-farmers, weavers, and tailors-who both studied Torah and supported their large families. Together they transformed the Kabbalistic strand of Judaism into a vigorous theology that explained how the physical world emanated in degrees from a purely spiritual G.o.d.

As the evening of Sabbath approached, Luria and the others decked themselves out in white and walked to the open fields to greet and welcome Bride Sabbath. From a high clearing they watched the sun sink; then they sang "L"kha dodi"-"Come, O bride, Come, O bride, O Sabbath Queen." They found that Bride Sabbath, whose light sanctifies the week, was akin to the Shekinah, that weeping and wandering woman who figures as G.o.d"s indwelling presence in the world, exiled here in suffering until redemption brings the world to G.o.d.

Their legends have a gilded, antique air. Rabbi Isaac Luria, said his disciple, could understand the language of birds. Birds" voices contain deep mysteries of the Torah.

Once, while Rabbi Isaac Luria was studying Torah in the fields of Safad, he saw a bunch of souls in a tree. He noticed, he told his disciple, that "all the trees were full of souls beyond number. The same was true of the field." G.o.d had cast them out for failing to repent. They had heard that he, Isaac Luria, had the power "to repair exiled souls." And so "several souls clad themselves in his prayer to accompany it" to G.o.d"s very throne. Souls can aid one another; with combined effort and with their rabbi, they can batter a way through to G.o.d.

That I, who have no rights in this matter, could freely enter this same sixteenth-century synagogue in which the masters had prayed astounded me. Here, in the building before me, Isaac Luria prayed the evening prayer, the prayer of eighteen benedictions. That number, meaning "life" in Hebrew, corresponds to the eighteen vertebrae we bend when we pray.

I was looking at the synagogue when a red-and-yellow hawk moth caught my eye. Keeping it in sight, I followed it across the street and into the synagogue"s stone courtyard, a sort of balcony over the steep mountainside. The red-and-yellow moth, in the usual blinding flurry, was feeding on blossoms-now white mallows, now red oleanders. Moving with the moth, I kept my eyes on it all around the courtyard. It flicked in and out of the blue flower called blood-of-the-Maccabees, in and out of the yellow jasmine of which Israelis say, "Two jasmines can drive a man crazy."

Then I stepped back on something thick and soft, and turned to look. It was a decapitated snake. It was no small poison adder but a wide and dark thing, mottled, like our corn snake or water snake.

Since there is a Talmudic blessing for everything else-for seeing the first blossoms of spring, for seeing a friend after a year"s absence, for smelling spiced oil-then surely a blessing must exist for seeing or stepping on a decapitated snake. When one sees an animal for the first time in one"s life, one thanks G.o.d, "FOR ALL CAME INTO BEING BY HIS WORD." Of course one blesses G.o.d for food. One generous Talmudist said a man could fulfill the obligation to bless the various foodstuffs individually by saying instead an all-purpose blessing, if he said it with devotion: "Blessed be He who created this object. HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS."

The snake"s body extended, curving, over three wide flagstones. Though it had stopped jerking, it did not yet stink. Only one fly had found its red meat. Its severed neck was smooth; a blade had cut it. Not only could I not find the snake head, I also lost the hawk moth, which flew over the wall, I think, and down the slope, toward the Sea of Galilee.

Ezekiel 3:1: Eat this scroll.

E N C O U N T E R S We encounter people, often tangentially. Leaving for Israel, I met a skycap at the airport. He was a hefty man in his sixties, whose face was bashed in. He imitated Elvis. It was just the two of us, standing at the curb; I was smoking a cigarette. As Elvis, he looked at me sidelong from slitty, puffed eyes, and sang, Love me tender, love me sweet, Never let me go.

You have made my life complete, And I love you so.

Then he slurred, "Thank you very much-Just kidding."

He began again abruptly: "This is Howard Cosell, The Wide World of Sports. Just kidding."

He told me he used to be a prizefighter. His splayed nose, ears, brow bones, and cheekbones bore him out. He ranked in the top one hundred, he said; his brother, a welterweight, ranked number nine.

"My wife says I"m drain-bamaged," he said, and looked at me sideways to see if I"d heard it.

"Just kidding," he said. "Thank you very much."

T H I N K E R In 135 C.E., the Romans killed Rabbi Akiva for teaching Torah. They killed him by flaying his skin and stripping his bones with currycombs. He was eighty-five years old. A Roman currycomb in those days was an iron sc.r.a.per; its blunt teeth combed mud and burrs from horsehair. To flay someone-an unusual torture-the wielder had to bear down. Perhaps the skin and muscles of an old scholar are comparatively loose.

"All depends on the preponderance of good deeds," Rabbi Akiva had said. The weight of good deeds bears down on the balance scales. Paul Tillich also held this view. If the man who stripped Rabbi Akiva"s bones with a currycomb bore down with a weight of, say, two hundred psi, how many pounds of good deeds would it take to tip the balance to the good?

"Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?" a twentieth-century novelist asked. "The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already."

(Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: "The princ.i.p.al danger of man is religion.") Akiva ben Joseph was born in the Judean lowlands in 50 C.E. He was illiterate and despised scholarship; he worked herding sheep. Then he fell in love with a rich man"s daughter. She agreed to marry him only when he vowed to devote his life to studying Torah. So he did. He learned to read along with their son.