by Lydia Davis
I made another list: Homo erectus dated from 1,800,000 B.C., or 1,800 millennia ago (1,802 counting our nearly 2 millennia since the year 0).
I said it to myself again: 1,800 millennia ago. The earliest remains of human culture dated from this time.
I was not even sure how to define culture. But there it was, defined for me: culture meant tools, language, and social activity.
I went on with my list:
The use of fire began: 500,000 B.C.
Early Homo sapiens: 300,000 B.C. Early Homo sapiens included Swanscombe man and Steinheim man.
Homo sapiens: 100,000 B.C. Neanderthal man. This species, with its clearly defined characteristics, remained essentially the same for sixty millennia.
I had to say it again: unchanged for sixty thousand years.
Then, “suddenly,” this species was wiped out. But “suddenly,” in this history, was a period of five thousand years. The suddenly was true, and the five thousand years were true. This species gave way to Homo sapiens sapiens in about 40,000 B.C., a completely different species morphologically, already virtually indistinguishable from present-day humans, and including Cro-Magnon man, Grimaldi man, Boskop man, and Wadjak man. This was the beginning of the last Ice Age in Europe.
End of the last Ice Age: 10,000 B.C. (twelve millennia ago counting our two millennia since the year 0).
Only at the end of the list, the end of the last Ice Age, did our two millennia become a significant fraction of the number. Through the rest of the list, especially in the beginning, these last two thousand years were so small a part of the number that they really had to be “rounded off.”
It felt strange to me, being “rounded off.” It was an uncanny sensation to see our two millennia gone, mathematically, in a moment. I already knew that in the universe, spatially, we were small. In time, too, our lives were brief, but it was easy to forget.
I went on reading, about the limestone hills of Southern France, about the Magdalenian cultures.
In that region of the country, the same human profile existed then (it was there in the Ice Age portraits) as now.
Was that possible? The same human profile continuing for twenty thousand years?
More than five hundred pieces of nonutilitarian shale or slate were found on the floor of a number of hilltop huts in Gönnersdorf, Germany, dating from around 10,500 B.C. They are engraved with hundreds of “buttocks” images, marked and overmarked.
Signs and symbols were engraved on stones and bones. Material included stone, bone, ivory, clay, antler, and horn. They painted with fingers, sticks, pads of fur, or moss; they daubed; they dotted; they sketched with colored materials and charcoals; they blew paint from their mouths or through a hollow bird bone. They used mineral “crayons,” brushes of hair and fiber. There was both humor and perspective earlier than we once supposed. There was the same outburst of innovative image-making at the same time among different people speaking different languages and having different bone structures. (No visitors from space were required to teach them.)
But what had originally startled me and what continued to surprise me was that this art changed so gradually, over twenty thousand years.
I had to wonder: Were the later millennia, including ours, actually longer, or larger, because more happened than happened in any one millennium between 30,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C.? Was our millennium less of a negligible fraction than I had thought?
But then I had to ask myself if it was really true that less had happened. Wasn’t it just that the farther back we go, the less we know about what happened? But then I remembered that the farther back we go, the fewer people there were in the world, and the fewer people there are, the less that happens—to people, anyway. So it really was true that less happened to people.
What was the population of the globe during the last Ice Age? I wanted to know. But I could not discover this. I could only discover that between the time of the Roman Empire and the colonizing of the New World, the world population increased from a quarter of a billion to half a billion. I could discover that in the “ancient world” the world’s population increased by only 0.1 percent a year.
But what I had also learned was that during the Pleistocene, the ice would come and go. Glacial advances would be interrupted by interglacial stages, during which the ice retreated and a comparatively mild climate prevailed. This was not what startled me. What startled me was learning that because the interglacial periods of the Pleistocene lasted longer than the time that has elapsed since the last retreat of the ice, the epoch that is occurring now, our epoch, called the Recent Epoch, may be merely another such interglacial stage and the glaciers may return at some future time.
Because I had not heard this before, I began to worry. Maybe everyone else knew this fact and I simply had not been paying attention. But maybe my reference books were too old, and most of what I thought I was learning had now been proven factually wrong.
I looked at their copyright pages. Yes, it was true that my books were rather out of date. My encyclopedia was about twenty-five years old. My dictionary was also about twenty-five years old. I was forty-eight years old, so when I bought them, I realized, I was young and they were new. I did not notice, as the years passed, that as I grew older they also changed, that my books were gradually becoming wrong about certain things.
Even though twenty-five years was not very long in terms of millennia, in each one of those past twenty-five years, many things happened, and a discovery might have been made that would cause me to have to change what I had thought especially about Paleolithic cultures, or the Ice Age. In fact, the discovery that the Pleistocene began more than 1.8 million years ago was made only five years or so before my encyclopedia was published and nearly missed being included in the book. Before that discovery, it was thought that the Pleistocene began much more recently.
The catalog I had from an exhibit of Ice Age art was about eighteen years old. But now I saw that my history of France was more recent—ten years old—and it confirmed what I was reading elsewhere. Best of all, a friend who read the newspapers every day confirmed, at least, the approximate dates of the prehistoric art-making. I saw that I could consider this friend to be a reference resource that was updated daily.
I was left with no answer to the question I had asked myself along the way: Was the real purpose of my investigation not to find out how long a millennium was and begin to know past millennia, but rather to situate myself further back in the span of time, so that what happened now did not matter as much? Was I, in fact, afraid of the present age, and was I even glad, rather than merely surprised, that the glaciers might return?
1996
Meeting Abraham Lincoln
1.
At a gathering just after Christmas last year, someone brought up the idea of how many handshakes might separate you from a famous person: that is, you might have shaken the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of Muhammad Ali. It’s a nice idea: it makes you feel close to greatness, or close to someone who otherwise would be very distant in time or in personal fame. I then told my story about Abraham Lincoln and shook the hand of each person standing in the small circle near a very broad fireplace with a hearth of worn, uneven bricks. We were in a house whose age is hard to pinpoint exactly because of contradictory architectural features, but that was built sometime between 1790 and 1830. I told them they were shaking the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln.
I can say that I am only three handshakes away from Lincoln, although it would be more accurate to say one handshake and two handclasps, since I did not shake but clasped my mother’s hand for the fifty-seven years that I knew her and she did not shake but clasped her great-grandfather’s hand for the fourteen years that she knew him. He was the one who shook Lincoln’s hand, traveling to Springfield, Illinois, to do so. But there are at least four somewhat differing accounts of this event, which makes you wonder about the accuracy of any historical account.
Clearly the meeting with Lincoln is something that certain members of my family have been proud of ever since it happened, but no one has it quite the same. Even old Grandpa Bent, the man who shook the great hand, may have had some of it wrong.
* * *
My mother’s was probably the hand I held most often, during certain years of my life, first when my hand was small and hers was larger, and last when she was often lying on her bed and I was sitting beside her, her hand softer and weaker and more crooked than mine. She herself held many hands when she was a little girl, because she was born into a family of three older brothers and an older sister as well as her widowed mother, many aunts and uncles, two grandparents, and two great-grandparents. Upon the death of her great-grandmother, when my mother was three years old, her family moved into the large house of her great-grandfather Bent, and beginning at that time, the old man, though he could be hard-hearted and mean-spirited, no doubt often held her hand, even kindly.
Clinton DeWitt Bent was named for DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York State in 1817, the year he was born in Sterling, New York. At the time of his birth—as his newspaper obituary pointed out—“Monroe was president of the United States, Napoleon Bonaparte was spending his days at St. Helena and Abraham Lincoln was a boy eight years of age.” The population of the entire United States was less than nine million. (Thus, the year 1817, though it is some two hundred years in the past, is only two handclasps away from me, even though I am only just leaving late middle age.)
Clinton Bent grew up in Sterling, married, and had three daughters. When the daughters were adolescents, the family went by train and covered wagon out to Iowa, where, two generations and some forty-seven years later, my mother was born. “He didn’t talk much about the trip out here,” said another of his great-grandchildren, “except that Grandma was afraid of the wolves.” In Iowa he planted orchards of fruit trees and became known as a highly skilled fruit grower.
The house was a good-sized brick one of two stories with central halls upstairs and down and a tall Scotch pine by the front windows. In the front yard, also, grew a cherry tree that bore white cherries, and on the south wall a special variety of apricot. The orchard contained peach and apple trees.
When my mother was four years old, her mother went back to work teaching in the local public school, and my mother was left in the care of the old man, who was known by all the family as Grandpa Bent, though he was grandfather only to some of them. At the time, he would have been eighty-nine or ninety. He was a teetotaler, a staunch Episcopalian, and tightfisted, driving hard bargains even with his own family. His great interests, besides the raising and breeding of fruit, seem to have been politics, education, religion, and managing his money.
Some of his and my mother’s activities during their days together we know about, and some we can guess. They walked every morning to the post office, half a mile or so away, probably often hand in hand, to collect his mail, including his copy of the Congressional Record. He spent some part of each day tending his orchard, with my mother tagging along behind. He would wheel out a large, heavy wheelbarrow to collect broken or trimmed branches for the fireplace. He had made the wheelbarrow himself out of the wood from an oak cask. He would sometimes wheel my mother in it as they went through the orchard.
Sometimes he did complicated work on the trees, once grafting multiple kinds of the best peaches onto one good trunk, thereby creating a single tree that bore several varieties. He would gather honey from his hives, a black veil hanging from his straw hat, his cuffs buttoned over his gloves, operating a bellows-like “smoker.” The cellar of the house was used for storing fruit and vegetables, and for the extra equipment of the beekeeping activities. It smelled of apples in the fall and winter, and decaying potatoes in the spring and early summer, overlaid with beeswax and bee smoke.
Outdoors and in, his little great-granddaughter would help the old man in small ways. When he was chilly, he would ask her to bring his sweater, saying, “Fetch my wampus!” He was a man of few words, a frequent admonition being “Take care!” We know that he spent a good deal of time in his room, reading his Congressional Record and the Bible, as well as another publication he subscribed to, The Prohibitionist. The old man consistently voted for the candidate of that party, when there was one, and when he died, he left most of his money to the cause. For decades, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century—a time when the citizens of the young nation were attempting to reconsider and refine its character—the temperance movement was strong: upright citizens were supposed to be teetotalers, and Iowa was a dry state.
Grandpa Bent’s room was the former parlor, off the dining room. It contained a massive four-poster spool bed, a hard-coal stove, and a screen before the fireplace depicting a boy in a yachting cap and short jacket helping his mother wind wool. Some of the pictures on the wall were framed with pine cones, others with carved wood. There was a cherry highboy and a corner whatnot with souvenirs from far-off places given to him by another of his granddaughters, who was a missionary in the Philippines.
In this parlor at four o’clock every afternoon he would peel and eat an apple, an unvarying habit even when, by late spring, before the early summer crop came in, the apples were small and wrinkled. He attributed his longevity in part to his daily apple and in part to his meager diet.
When my mother’s family first moved in with him, he ate dinner in the dining room with the five children and their mother, but he was not always pleased with the children’s manners. My mother’s mother liked them to be sociable and talkative at dinner, and she had also elicited a promise from him that only she would “speak to” the children. And so he would sit in silence glowering at them when they committed a breach of manners. Eventually his dinners were brought to him on a tray in his own room, whether by his choice or hers is not clear.
* * *
One could say that an interest in politics must have run in his family, to judge by his parents’ naming him after Governor Clinton. On the other hand, the country itself was so young in 1817—only about forty years old—that a lively concern with the government of the country would most likely have been deeply inherent in everyday life. The first five presidents of the United States, after all, had been Revolutionary Patriots. Still, he seems, on the evidence of his subscription to the Congressional Record and his unfailing habit of voting in presidential elections, to have been particularly keen or dedicated. By the time he died, at age ninety-nine and a half, he had voted in twenty presidential elections. This was a record in those days, and would be hard to surpass even now, of course. He was taken by carriage to the polling place for the last time just nine days before his death. In this election he voted for the Prohibition candidate, declaring that he wanted to cast his twentieth vote for president against the whiskey evil. (Three years after his death, Prohibition was enacted.)
It was his keen interest in the business of government that led him to seek out Abraham Lincoln. Although, in each election, he favored the temperance candidate in any case, he had heard good reports of Lincoln and wished to meet him face-to-face in order to form his own opinion of him. This much, at least, seems clear. In our family lore, however, there are at least four different accounts of this meeting, which is where the writing of history reveals itself to be so complicated.
The briefest comes in a letter dating back forty years or so, from the same great-grandson who had heard about Grandma Bent and the wolves during the journey out west by covered wagon:
Grandfather Bent told me the story of how he happened to vote for Abe Lincoln. He went to Springfield and spent the afternoon visiting with Mr. Lincoln. He came away convinced that he would vote for him. They really valued their voting rights in those days.
This account, since it is the sparest, is also generally in agreement with the others, except that afternoon becomes evening in the expanded versions. My mother’s mother tells a longer version that does not contradict this brief version, but we can’t be sure how reliable she was.
Her reports of her life, in the pages she left behind, are sometimes colored with a positive view that my mother found false, saying: “I have wished that Mother had been more realistic in her account.” My mother’s mother, for example, says that her grandfather Bent was “the sunniest, dearest old man that could be desired. ‘He was no more trouble than a canary-bird,’ I used often to tell people, and it was true. He was a fine-looking old gentleman with regular features and a full white beard. With kindly blue eyes that twinkled with fun most times when he looked at you.” My mother says: “How can she describe her grandfather Bent as always full of fun? When he was my babysitter I remember him as laconic, to say the least.” We know from other sources about the glowering at the dinner table, the hard bargain over a land rental with a certain nephew, the intolerance when it came to drinking liquor. With due skepticism, then, here is account number 2, by my mother’s mother:
Grandpa loved to tell us of the time that he had gone to see Abraham Lincoln in Springfield Illinois. He went to the house and Mrs. Lincoln let him in, he said. Lincoln was out but she invited Grandpa to come in and wait till he returned.
The story was quite a long one as Grandpa told it. He had heard and read much of this great man, he said, but wanted to talk with him personally before voting for him.
But after this visit and the conversation he had with Lincoln, he told us that he was convinced that his vote would be well cast for “Honest Abe.” Then Grandpa finished the story, always exactly the same way:
“I looked up at the tall man, I had to look way up to him, and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Lincoln, I hope you get to be president, and that you will be as much better than the rest of us as you are taller.’ He laffed, and thanked me, and—”
Now, my mother herself has a different account of the meeting. She was a smart woman and had a gift for telling anecdotes and great consistency from one telling to the next. But she was also a romantic, and a proficient short-story writer accustomed to condensing and reshaping and adding the occasional flourish. She may have been tempted to alter and embroider in this case, too. Her account includes afternoon and evening both: