The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

by Annie Dillard

  Even three years later, after he had survived a heart attack, and after hundreds of their love letters had flown all over the world for decades, after hundreds of reunions and partings, and after hundreds of visits in New York, he wrote her that he hoped that “things” would “gradually settle emotionally.” There was not much “gradually” left, though, as he died eleven days later. A snapshot of Lucile Swan outdoors in her sixties shows a magnificent beauty. A dog holds one end of a towel in its teeth, while she holds the other in her hand; the dog, looking at her face, is clearly waiting for her to do her part right. She lived another ten years after Teilhard died.

  “What is born between us is forever: I know it,” he wrote her. One fervently hopes so. One also hopes—at least this one does—that in heaven souls suffer fewer scruples, or better yet, none at all.

  The material world for Teilhard dissolves at the edges and grows translucent. The earth is a Solutrean blade. It thins to an atom. As a young scientist, he held the usual view that the world is all material; from it spirit could not derive. Soon he inverted the terms: The world is all spirit, from which matter cannot derive, save through Christ. “Christ spreads through the universe, dissolved at the edges.” This is just the sort of idiosyncratic, brilliant lexicon that drives his doctrine-minded readers mad: Christ is chert; chert is Christ. The world is incandescent. Things are “innumerable prolongations of divine being.” Or, “Things retain their individuality but seem to be lighted from within and made of active, translucent flesh.”

  Even the purest metaphysical Taoist thinkers, the Lungman Taoists, say that people “can assist in improving the divine handiwork”—or, as a modern Taoist puts it, people may “follow the Will of the Creator in guiding the world in its evolution toward the ultimate Reality.” Even Meister Eckhart said, “God needs man.” God needs man, said Teilhard as well, to disclose him, complete him, and fulfill him. Teilhard’s friend Abbé Paul Grenet paraphrased his thinking about God: “His name is holy, but it is up to us to sanctify it; his reign is universal, but it is up to us to make him reign; his will be done, but it is up to us to accomplish it.”

  “Little by little,” the paleontologist himself said, “the work is being done.”

  TEACHING A STONE TO TALK

  AN EXPEDITION TO THE POLE

  I

  THERE IS A SINGING GROUP in this Catholic church today, a singing group that calls itself “Wildflowers.” The lead is a tall, square-jawed teenaged boy, buoyant and glad to be here. He carries a guitar; he plucks out a little bluesy riff and hits some chords. With him are the rest of the Wildflowers. There is an old woman, wonderfully determined; she has long orange hair and is dressed country-and-western style. A long embroidered strap around her neck slings a big western guitar low over her pelvis. Beside her stand a frail, withdrawn fourteen-year-old boy and a large Chinese man in his twenties who seems to want to enjoy himself but is not quite sure how. He looks around wildly as he sings, and shuffles his feet. There is also a very tall teenaged girl, presumably the lead singer’s girlfriend; a wispy soprano, she is delicate of feature, half serene and half petrified. They straggle out in front of the altar to teach us a brand-new hymn.

  It all seems a pity at first, for I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing precisely in order to escape Protestant guitars. Why am I here then? Who gave these nice Catholics guitars? Why are they not mumbling in Latin and performing superstitious rituals? What is the Pope thinking of?

  Nobody said things were going to be easy. A taste for the sublime is, after all, a greed like any other; why begrudge the churches their secularism now, when from the general table is rising a general song? Besides, in a way I do not pretend to understand, these people—all the people, in all the ludicrous churches—have access to the land.

  THE LAND

  The Pole of Relative Inaccessibility is “that imaginary point on the Arctic Ocean farthest from land in any direction.” It is a navigator’s paper point contrived to console Arctic explorers who, after Peary and Henson reached the North Pole in 1909, had nowhere special to go. There is a Pole of Relative Inaccessibility on the Antarctic continent, also; it is that point of land farthest from salt water in any direction.

  The Absolute is the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility located in metaphysics. After all, one of the few things we know about the Absolute is that it is relatively inaccessible. It is that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point in all directions. Like the others, it is a Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also—I take this as given—the pole of great price.

  THE PEOPLE

  It is the second Sunday in Advent. For a year I have been attending Mass at this Catholic church. Every Sunday for a year I have run away from home and joined the circus as a dancing bear. We dancing bears have dressed ourselves in buttoned clothes; we mince around the rings on two feet. Today we were restless; we kept dropping onto our forepaws.

  No one, least of all the organist, could find the opening hymn. Then no one knew it. Then no one could sing anyway.

  There was no sermon, only announcements.

  The priest proudly introduced the rascally acolyte who was going to light the two Advent candles. As we all could plainly see, the rascally acolyte had already lighted them.

  During the long intercessory prayer, the priest always reads “intentions” from the parishioners. These are slips of paper, dropped into a box before the service begins, on which people have written their private concerns, requesting our public prayers. The priest reads them, one by one, and we respond on cue. “For a baby safely delivered on November twentieth,” the priest intoned, “we pray to the Lord.” We all responded, “Lord, hear our prayer.” Suddenly the priest broke in and confided to our bowed heads, “That’s the baby we’ve been praying for the past two months! The woman just kept getting more and more pregnant!” How often, how shockingly often, have I exhausted myself in church from the effort to keep from laughing out loud? I often laugh all the way home. Then the priest read the next intention: “For my son, that he may forgive his father. We pray to the Lord.” “Lord, hear our prayer,” we responded, chastened.

  A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In 2,000 years, we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples’ dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, it is all right—believe it or not—to be people.

  Who can believe it?

  During communion, the priest handed me a wafer that proved to be stuck to five other wafers. Resisting the impulse to help, I waited while he tore the clump into rags of wafer. Directly to my left, and all through communion, a woman on the piano was banging out the theme from The Sound of Music.

  THE LAND

  Nineteenth-century explorers set the pattern for polar expeditions: Elaborately provisioned ships set out for high latitudes. Soon they encounter the pack ice and equinoctial storms. Ice coats the deck, spars, and rigging; the masts and hull shudder; the sea freezes around the rudder, and then fastens on the ship. Early sailors try ramming, sawing, or blasting the ice ahead of the ship, before they give up and settle in for the winter. In the nineteenth century, this being “beset” in the pack often killed polar crews; later explorers expected it and learned, finally, to put it to use. Sometimes officers and men move directly onto the pack ice for safety; they drive tent stakes into the ice and pile wooden boxes about for tables and chairs.

  Sooner or later, the survivors of that winter or the next, or some of them, set off over the pack ice on foot. Depending on circumstances, they are looking either for a Pole or, more likely, for help. They carry supplies, including boats, on sledges fastened to shoulder harnesses. South Polar expeditions usually begin from a base camp e
stablished onshore. In either case, the terrain is so rough, and the men so weakened by scurvy, that the group makes only a few miles a day. Sometimes they find an island on which to live or starve the next winter; sometimes they turn back to safety, stumble onto some outpost of civilization, or are rescued by another expedition; very often, when warm weather comes and the pack ice splits into floes, they drift and tent on a floe, or hop from floe to floe, until the final floe lands, splits, or melts.

  In 1847, according to Arctic historian L. P. Kirwan, the American ship Polaris “was struck by an enormous floe. And just as stores, records, clothing, equipment, were being flung from the reeling ship, she was swept away through the Arctic twilight, with most, but not all of her crew on board. Those left behind drifted for thirteen hundred miles on an ice-floe until they were rescued, starving and dazed, off the coast of Labrador.”

  Polar explorers were chosen, as astronauts are today, from the clamoring, competitive ranks of the sturdy, skilled, and sane. Many of the British leaders, in particular, were men of astonishing personal dignity. Reading their accounts of life in extremis, one is struck by their unending formality toward each other. When Scott’s Captain Oates sacrificed himself on the Antarctic peninsula because his ruined feet were slowing the march, he stepped outside the tent one night to freeze himself in a blizzard, saying to the others, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

  Even in the privacy of their journals and diaries, polar explorers maintain a fine reserve. In his journal, Ernest Shackleton described his feeling upon seeing, for the first time in human history, the Antarctic continent beyond the mountains ringing the Ross Ice Shelf: “We watched the new mountains rise from the great unknown that lay ahead of us,” he wrote, “with feelings of keen curiosity, not unmingled with awe.” One wonders, after reading a great many such firsthand accounts, if polar explorers were not somehow chosen for the empty and solemn splendor of their prose styles—or even if some eminent Victorians, examining their own prose styles, realized, perhaps dismayed, that from the look of it, they would have to go in for polar exploration. Salomon Andrée, the doomed Swedish balloonist, was dying of starvation on an Arctic island when he confided in his diary, with almost his dying breath, “Our provisions must soon and richly be supplemented, if we are to have any prospect of being able to hold on for a time.”

  THE PEOPLE

  The new Episcopalian and Catholic liturgies include a segment called “passing the peace.” Many things can go wrong here. I know of one congregation in New York that fired its priest because he insisted on their passing the peace—which involves nothing more than shaking hands with your neighbors in the pew. The men and women of this small congregation, though, had limits to their endurance; and passing the peace fell beyond those limits. They could not endure shaking hands with people against whom they bore lifelong grudges. So they fired the priest and found a new one more sympathetic to their needs.

  The rubric for passing the peace requires that one shake hands with whoever is handy and say, “Peace be with you.” The other responds, “Peace be with you.” Every rare once in a while, someone responds simply “Peace.” Today I was sitting beside two teenaged lugs with small mustaches. When it came time to pass the peace I shook hands with one of the lugs and said, “Peace be with you,” to which he replied, “Yeah.”

  THE TECHNOLOGY

  The turning point in Arctic exploration was the Franklin Expedition. The expedition itself accomplished nothing, and all its members died. But its failure to return, and the mystery of its whereabouts, attracted so much publicity in Europe and the United States that thirty ships set out looking for traces of the ships and men; these search parties explored and mapped the Arctic for the first time, found the Northwest Passage which Franklin had sought, and developed a technology adapted to Arctic conditions, a technology capable of bringing explorers back alive. The technology of the Franklin expedition, by contrast, was adapted only to conditions in the Royal Navy officers’ clubs in England. The Franklin expedition stood on its dignity.

  In 1845, Sir John Franklin and 138 officers and men embarked from England to find the Northwest Passage across the high Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. They sailed in two three-masted barques. Each sailing vessel carried an auxiliary steam engine and a twelve-day supply of coal for the entire projected two or three years’ voyage. Instead of additional coal, according to L. P. Kirwan, each ship made room for a 1,200-volume library, “a hand-organ, playing fifty tunes,” china place settings for officers and men, cut-glass wine goblets, and sterling silver flatware. The officers’ sterling silver knives, forks, and spoons were particularly interesting. The silver was of ornate Victorian design, very heavy at the handles and richly patterned. Engraved on the handles were the individual officers’ initials and family crests. The expedition carried no special clothing for the Arctic, only the uniforms of Her Majesty’s Navy.

  The ships set out in great glory and fanfare. Franklin uttered his utterance: “The highest object of my desire is faithfully to perform my duty.” Two months later a British whaling captain met the two barques in Lancaster Sound; he reported back to England on the high spirits of officers and men. He was the last European to see any of them alive.

  Years later, civilization learned that many groups of Inuit had hazarded across tableaux involving various still-living or dead members of the Franklin expedition. Some had glimpsed, for instance, men pushing and pulling a wooden boat across the ice. Some had found, at a place called Starvation Cove, this boat, or a similar one, and the remains of the thirty-five men who had been dragging it. At Terror Bay the Inuit found a tent on the ice, and in it, thirty bodies. At Simpson Strait some Inuit had seen a very odd sight: the pack ice pierced by the three protruding wooden masts of a barque.

  For twenty years, search parties recovered skeletons from all over the frozen sea. Franklin himself—it was learned after twelve years—had died aboard ship. Their captain dead, the ships frozen into the pack winter after winter, and supplies exhausted, the remaining officers and men had decided to walk to help. They outfitted themselves from ships’ stores for the journey; their bodies were found with those supplies they had chosen to carry. Accompanying one clump of frozen bodies, for instance, which incidentally showed evidence of cannibalism, were place settings of sterling silver flatware engraved with officers’ initials and family crests. A search party found, on the ice far from the ships, a letter clip, and a piece of the very backgammon board Lady Jane Franklin had given her husband as a parting gift.

  Another search party found two skeletons in a boat on a sledge. These unfortunates had hauled the boat sixty-five miles. With the two skeletons were some chocolate, guns, tea, and a great deal of table silver. Many miles south of these two was another skeleton, alone. This was a frozen officer. In his pocket he had, according to Kirwan, “a parody of the sea-shanty.” The skeleton was in uniform: trousers and jacket “of fine blue cloth . . . edged with silk braid, with sleeves slashed and bearing five covered buttons each. Over this uniform the dead man had worn a blue greatcoat, with a black silk neckerchief.” That was the Franklin expedition.

  Sir Robert Falcon Scott, who died on the Antarctic peninsula, was never able to bring himself to use dogs, let alone feed them to each other or eat them. Instead he struggled with English ponies, for whom he carried hay. Scott felt that eating dogs was inhumane. He also felt that when one reached a Pole unaided, the journey had “a fine conception” and “the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.” It is this loftiness of sentiment, this purity, this dignity and self-control, that makes Scott’s farewell letters—found under his body—such moving documents.

  Less moving are documents from successful polar expeditions. Their leaders relied on native technology, which, as every book ever written about the Inuit put it, was “adapted to harsh conditions.”

  Roald Amundsen, who returned in triumph from the South Pole, traveled Inuit-style; he made good speed using sleds and feeding dogs t
o dogs on a schedule. Robert E. Peary and Matthew Henson reached the North Pole in the company of four Inuit. Throughout the Peary expedition, the Inuit drove the dog teams, built igloos, and supplied seal and walrus clothing.

  There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer, fine as the conception may be.

  THE PEOPLE

  I have been attending Catholic Mass for only a year. Before that, the handiest church was Congregational. Week after week I climbed the steps to that little church, entered, and took a seat with some few of my neighbors. Week after week I was moved by the pitiableness of the bare linoleum-floored sacristy no flowers could soften or cheer, by the terrible singing I so loved, by the fatigued Bible readings, the lagging emptiness and dilution of the liturgy, the horrifying vacuity of the sermon, and by the fog of dreary senselessness pervading the whole, which existed alongside, and probably caused, the wonder of the fact that we came; that we returned; that we showed up, week after week, and went through with it. Once, while we were reciting the Gloria, a farmer’s wife whom I knew slightly gave me a sudden, triumphant glance.