Symbols allow us to navigate that uncertainty. Water is just water but its constant flow is also suggestive of souls passing from the temporal world to some eternal place. In nature, symbols of continuity are everywhere. Snakes are reborn after shedding their skin. The moon, full orbed or tending to decline, wanes and dies and comes back. The sun is vanquished by darkness, but each night perishes into daylight. The tide rises and washes out. What are seasons if not cyclical?
There are as many hierophanies as there are stars. Stars! Shining up there, so far away, stars suggest realities beyond the here and now. Whatever put the stars up in the sky, it occurred to us eons ago, can only have done so before we were around. This realization led to a sense of instability, of having been deposited into an incomprehensible world not of our making, and so the thought arose that perhaps someone, an efficient presence, a God or the gods, put them there. Seeking to regain our footing, we concluded that whoever did so must also be watching over us. By making ourselves important—the center of it all—we restored the illusion of purpose. If the stars are here for a reason, that means we are here for a reason, and perhaps we can understand that reason. We matter, we assured each other, because we matter to whatever put the stars there.
We still try to convince ourselves that the world is meaningful, but we can’t, logically, unless we accept this very unknowability as a gateway to the sacred. Believing not only helps us cope with our inability to comprehend, it elevates and ennobles that seeming inaptitude. In belief, stars become holes in the firmament with paradise shining through. Stars can be heavy-lidded eyes glowing in darkness, seeing through the veil of endless night, blinking promises of daylight beyond. Stars might be what we turn into when we die. Stars are probably friends awaiting us.
Indeterminacy is a beautiful word. All our interpretations of the noninterpretable are just that: opinions. We cannot put the Truth into words or images. That hasn’t deterred us from trying everything from the water of life to the starry skies. Symbols, mythologies, and religions all help us come to an acceptance of the unknowable. As the Sufis say, “A person who seeks God through logical proof is like someone who searches for the sun with a lamp.”
* * *
1. In Italy, “taking the waters” is not an anachronism; it’s medicine. Trips to medicinal hot springs today are covered by health care. Many Italians spend two weeks each year at thermal establishments.
8
The Magical Fountain
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.
—The Mahabharata
You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
SHORTLY BEFORE 9:00 a.m. on a blustery spring morning, the fountain of youth’s gatekeeper walked into a café near Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Tilting her Armani shades up into a graying-blond bob, she scanned the room. I was reading the newspaper at a table near the entrance. A Brazilian priest attached to a thousand helium-filled party balloons had gone missing somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.
“You must be Adam,” she said, extending her hand. A graceful, slight woman in her early sixties, Martha Morano owned a public relations firm specializing in ultraexclusive luxury-travel destinations. I’d contacted her to discuss one of the stranger gems in her portfolio: a seven-hundred-acre, eleven-island archipelago in the Bahamas belonging to the magician David Copperfield.
“It’s truly a fairyland,” said Martha. She handed me a press kit and a rattan-wrapped stack of postcards bursting with palm fronds, white sandbars, and aquamarine expanses. “May I ask how you heard about Musha Cay?”
The answer was in my briefcase. I pulled out the moldering newspaper clipping, a two-year-old wire story about Copperfield’s discovery of the “real” fountain of youth. “We found this liquid that in its simple stages can actually do miraculous things,” Copperfield told the Reuters writer. “You can take dead leaves, they come into contact with the water, they become full of life again. Bugs or insects that are near death come in contact with the water, they fly away. It’s an amazing thing, very exciting.”
According to the report, Copperfield had hired biologists and geologists to examine the fountain’s potential effect on humans. Until the tests were carried out, the magician said he was refusing anyone else access to the water. Its location—a spot where “everything is more vibrant, ageless, and full of life”—was being kept secret. Getting there wasn’t simply a matter of chartering a catamaran or attaching myself to helium-filled party balloons. Renting the property cost $32,250 per day (approximately my net annual income). The only way in was right in front of me.
“I understand that David wants to protect the fountain while completing the research phase,” I acknowledged. “Do you think enough time has passed that he’d be willing to speak to me about his findings?”
Martha sat there, arms folded, eyes narrowing. She’d agreed to meet me because a friend of hers was an editor of mine at Gourmet magazine. That didn’t alter the fact that it was a touchy time in Copperfield’s camp. Media relations had been strained ever since his engagement to supermodel Claudia Schiffer ended in 1999. They’d worsened in 2007, when a twenty-one-year-old beauty-pageant runner-up accused him of raping her on the island. The subsequent FBI investigation, including a raid on his Las Vegas warehouse, was widely publicized. He’d canceled shows, an entire tour. At the time, the case remained pending. (As I will discuss later, the investigation was ultimately dropped.) Those tabloid reports hadn’t escaped my notice, but my mission was the fountain.
“I don’t know if David will go for it,” Martha said, adjusting her fringed cashmere stole. “When he went out there with that fountain thing, he was scorned by the media.”
“I don’t intend on ridiculing him. But there’s clearly a story here.”
“David would agree with that—the island is all he thinks about.”
David reminded me of Prospero, the deposed ruler and sorcerer exiled on his tropical island. Only he wasn’t a Shakespeare creation: he was an aging prestidigitator embroiled in scandal who’d issued a press release about finding a miraculous body of water on his private island. He hadn’t yet hung up his flying shoes, but his days of walking through the Great Wall of China were over. The crown duke of late twentieth-century magic had been replaced by edgier pretenders to the throne like Criss Angel and David Blaine. It had been years and years since he’d made any national monuments disappear on a CBS special.
As kids, my brothers and I would gape at videos of David Copperfield dangling upside down, ten stories above a pit of burning spikes, freeing himself from a straitjacket, from the confines of insanity. He looked longingly into the camera as though into a lover’s eyes. Somehow, his expensively coiffed mane always seemed to be billowing in the breeze. Even though the lothario shtick was cringingly corny (rival magicians griped about his act’s being to entertainment what Velveeta is to cheese), we’d still get all goosey when he came on the TV. Whatever anybody thought of him, during those filet years, it was impossible not to watch his latest stunt. Copperfield went beyond good or bad: he was something we grew up with, like microwaved hot dogs or Bazooka Joe comics. As dubious as that Reuters report may have been, the mental image of brown leaves turning green in the fountain had a hold on me. I wanted to believe that he’d found something important.
“Did he really hire scientists to study the liquid?” I pressed Martha. “It says here that it ‘rejuvenates simple organisms.’ Is he serious?”
“He’s very serious about this,” she said. “It’s about a belief that there’s something other than science.”
Copperfield’s conviction that some aspects of life are impervious to scientific inquiry was a sentiment I—and everyone else I’d spoken to for this book—shared. The accomplishments of science over the past few centuries have led to the perception that believing is a pri
mitive means of thinking, an anachronism. But rationality cannot access the unseen. We want to believe that no aspects of life are resistant to proof—that we simply haven’t yet devised the proper means of testing and then understanding them. Some physicists still speak of formulating an all-encompassing theory of everything, as though the entire universe could be reduced to a single equation. There’s a utopian fantasy that, with enough rigorous scrutiny, everything everywhere can be explained. Such scientism scoffs at belief without realizing its own faith-blindered shortcomings.
Civilization has indisputably accumulated vast databases of findings, but never before have we been so perplexed about what it all means. Despite our fetishizing the assumption that everything is ultimately knowable, countless aspects of the human experience will forever remain under the jurisdiction of belief. Time and consciousness are indefinable, and nothing in that ever-widening body of knowledge can tell us what happens, if anything, when we die.
To be human is to be preoccupied with hopes of comprehending why we’re here and who we are, but the deeper we delve into any avenue of inquiry, the more fathomless it all becomes. At a certain point, we have to confront the realization of how little we actually know; we have to take that leap—to the fountain.
“To be perfectly honest with you, I’ve never seen the fountain,” Martha admitted. Her body language intimated that it couldn’t be real, but she didn’t know for sure. I wavered. Yes, Copperfield had amassed a fortune by making people believe that the impossible just might be real. But this seemed different. “It isn’t one of his magic tricks, I can assure you of that,” Martha added.
We’re all programmed with a need to believe, which is why magic can still enchant us, even when we’re aware it’s an illusion. By suspending our disbelief, an entertainer permits us to switch from our logical, empirical, analytical framework into a sense of awe, a sense that is also at the heart of religious worship. The make-believe can make us believe. To counter this susceptibility to suggestion, we fortify ourselves with cynicism. Yet beneath our skeptic’s armor, what we all seek, whether in books, movies, love, drugs, dreams, consumer goods—or God—is a glimpse of the beyond, another world, something greater than ourselves.
Martha and I started speaking about the idea of belief in a secular age, about the ways knowledge and belief seem to be opposites, about how we only believe in things we can’t know.
“And what’s the difference between faith and belief?” Martha asked sincerely.
“I think of beliefs as personal truths that cannot be verified or unverified,” I said, trying to sound believable. “And I suppose faith is a ritualistic, repetitive practice that deepens those beliefs.”
“But you can have faith in someone,” she interjected, uncertainly.
“You’re right.” I nodded, treading semantic water. “Like having faith in me and this story and letting me visit the fountain?”
“Well, you do have a different way of seeing this.” Martha got up to order a coffee. “But David’s the one who decides. You’ll have to write him a proposal. All I can do is make sure it gets into his hands.”
* * *
As Martha stood in line for our coffees, I opened the glossy folder full of promotional materials she’d brought along. Musha Cay was billed as “the most private private island experience in the world.” Copperfield claimed he’d found it by drawing a line from Stonehenge to the statues of Easter Island and another line between the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán. The lines intersected at the exact latitude and longitude of his Caribbean hideaway.
In aerial photographs, the main island resembled a bat with its wings outstretched. The archipelago’s other outposts had names such as Isle of Wonder, Alchemy Bay, and Forbidden Island. The information kit noted that each of the five guesthouses has its own private beach. Forty beaches are scattered throughout the eleven islands. The main house, where Copperfield spends much of his free time, is a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion perched like a black eagle on Musha’s summit. Having purchased the cluster for $50 million in 2005, he started renting it out soon thereafter. Google owner Sergey Brin married Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of a personal genome sequencing service called 23andMe.com, on one of the island’s sandbars. Other high-profile visitors included Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and various socialites able to spend six figures on a weekend getaway. The rental fee, soon to be increased to $37,750 per night, entailed a four-night minimum stay and allowed up to twelve guests. There were enough beds to sleep twenty-four; bringing an additional twelve people raised the total daily rate to $50,250 (plus a 5 percent surcharge for Bahamian room tax). Not included in the booking fee: international phone calls, fireworks, steel-drum concerts, or treasure hunts. The brochure recommended traveling there by private jet or yacht. If necessary, one could always take a commercial airline to George Town. From Exuma International, it’s an hour-long speedboat jaunt or fifteen minutes on a Super Twin Otter amphibious aircraft.
The pamphlets referred to Copperfield as “the master.” Because he lived there when not on tour or in Vegas, the master was available for meet and greets. “Guests if they wish can ask for some time with him, just to chat or, if they’re lucky, to experience a slight [sic] of his hand. Should the guests prefer, the master will be as invisible as he becomes in his international shows.”
* * *
“I’d love to know the real story behind that fountain,” Martha said, returning with espressos. Getting caffeinated, she started steering the discussion into questions of mythology, history, and culture. We spoke about Kublai Khan, whose stately pleasure dome in Xanadu cast its shadow over a mighty, sacred fountain. That segued into talk of Michael Jackson’s Neverland, about the lumpen fascination with unfettered wealth and fame, how the scrutiny must be so warping. “David just escaped,” she said in a hushed voice. “And Musha is where he escaped to. I really see him as an other-dimensional character because he doesn’t live in this world. He occasionally steps into this realm in order to manipulate it somehow, but he left this life a long time ago and has been living in another one. He’s just not here.”
Finishing her coffee, Martha mentioned that she’d seen Armida, the Rossini opera in which the sorceress turns a forest into a pleasure palace.
“And that reminded you of Copperfield’s island?” I asked.
“Yes, although there’s an evil component there, in the opera, so you probably don’t want to go there . . .”
I raised my eyebrows.
“. . . or do you?”
“I’d just like to describe Musha and the fountain, as they really are, without diluting anything.”
It was clear that she’d help. But the master still needed to be sold. Everything hung on a letter.
“It really is so bizarre down there,” she said, leaning in. “And he’s bizarre beyond belief. He’s such a bizarre person. He always has a bevy of . . . strange characters . . . with him. You know, David is the fountain of youth.”
9
Letters upon Letters: Dividing the Invisible
What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds?
—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Come, ye wheeling cumuli, ye clammy condensations, come!
—Aristophanes, The Clouds
IN 1165 CE, a letter arrived in the hands of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I of Constantinople. A grump who favored jewel-bedecked robes of imperial purple, the emperor likely read the note with the same distrustful frown he sports in gold-leaf portraits. The letter contained world-changing information. Copies had also been sent to Pope Alexander III, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, and various other European monarchs, all of whom were equally startled by the epistle’s contents.
The sender claimed to rule the Orient. His empire, centered in India, extended westward to the Tower of Babel in deserted Babylon and all the way to the wastes beyond the sunrise. His realm was called the Magnificence. A direct descendant of the magi from the Gospels, h
e boasted of surpassing everyone else in virtue, riches, and power. He even owned the fountain of youth.
His name was Prester John, and he was offering to help.
The letter arrived shortly after the failed Second Crusade, which ended with defeat in the orchards of Damascus. Christendom’s plenipotentiaries were desperate. Even though Prester John dared to suggest that his Magnificence was closer to God than the Vatican, news from a Christian chief reigning somewhere on the far side of the Holy Land sounded heaven-sent.
Europe’s leaders had been alerted to the correspondent’s existence about twenty years earlier, when a Syrian bishop arrived bearing tales of an emerald-scepter-wielding Eastern despot. Prester John had already taken Persia, the bishop enthused, and he wanted to assist the Crusaders in their efforts to control Jerusalem. Unfortunately, his army hadn’t yet found a way to ford the Tigris.
The arrival of the letter reinforced what everybody at the time believed: that paradise was a place on earth, somewhere around India. And as Prester John’s detailed inventory of his resources attested, something heavenly was indeed bubbling out of those sacred lands: “From hour to hour, and day by day, the taste of this fountain varies; and its source is hardly three days’ journey from Paradise, from which Adam was expelled. If any man drinks thrice of this spring, he will from that day feel no infirmity, and he will, as long as he lives, appear of the age of thirty.”
Prester John’s kingdom also contained other marvels, including cyclopes, horned men, and people with eyes on both sides of their heads. Rivers brimmed with gemstones. There was a sandy sea with no water. “The sand moves and swells into waves and is never still,” he wrote. “It is not possible to navigate this sea by any means.” He told of citizens who weren’t afraid of death. When one died, their compatriots would eat the corpse. At the top of a spiral staircase built out of lavender crystal was a speculum that reflected all the happenings in the provinces under his purview.
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