Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  Next morning I had breakfast with Academician Velikov of the Russian National Academy of Sciences. This was before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the Academy had the backing of a superpower in addition to its distinction. We were together at a single table and able to discuss a number of topics; I was delighted to find that he was as sceptical about the efforts to find life on Mars as I was. We talked mostly about planetary science and the environment, and I wished that we had had more time.

  At the Town Hall I listened to a few more talks and then went on to Christ Church for another all too brief meeting with Sandy in the quad. She reminded me to be sure to attend the dinner at Blenheim Palace, the great occasion of the conference—she added that I would be collected by a coach from my hotel. In the afternoon there were some workshops, but they were wholly humanist. I accept that people and their rights are important, but my interest was in our habitat, the Earth, and I was disappointed to find the participants so uninterested in anything to do with the Earth. I went back to the Randolph to sit and think, and I had not been there long before Carl Sagan telephoned and asked if he could talk with me. I was delighted and invited him to come to my suite, where we sat and talked over old times and new ideas. Carl had always been a friend and I had found him the most amiable of men; I felt sad that he and Lynn had failed to make a go of it. Then it was time for me to get dressed for the dinner at Blenheim Palace.

  Soon the coach was waiting to pick us up. Everyone was decked in their finery: the Africans in their ceremonial costumes, the clerics in theirs, and the Western males in their dinner-jacket uniforms. We arrived to the sound of a military band and were led up the steps into the great reception hall and introduced to our host for the evening, Sir George Sinclair and his wife Mollie. Soon after the champagne reception, we went into the library at Blenheim, a grand room designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The dinner tables seemed to enhance, not disturb the ambience of that elegant room, and they were circular, each seating eight, spread across the library floor—an ideal arrangement. I was at the table with Sir George Sinclair and his wife and the publisher, Henry Luce; there were four others whose names I wish I could remember. It was a pleasant dinner, with splendid food and wine, and at the end of it, I was in a mellow and happy mood. I left the dinner table after the last toast and speech and made my way to the corridor, where I visited the magnificent Blenheim loos. I came back up into the corridor, now somewhat behind the rest of the crowd, and walked along at a comfortable pace aiming for the main hallway and staircase and the buses. My mind was in a cosy neutral state, mulling over the lively conversation and the splendid dinner, and then as I approached that part of the hall at Blenheim above the stairway to the entrance door, I saw Sandy straight ahead of me. She was in a small group that was talking animatedly, but suddenly she turned her head and looked towards me. Our eyes locked and we both moved as if drawn by a powerful force: we were in each other’s arms wholly unaware of the throng around us. Saying nothing, I remember taking her hand and going down the stairs and out through the door, and into one of the waiting coaches. It seemed more like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach, and I wondered if we failed to reach Oxford before midnight chimed on the many clocks of Oxford’s colleges, would this wonderful, wonderful illusion just vanish? We sat close together saying little, holding each other’s hands, until the coach arrived at the Randolph, my destination, and that was it. I remember Sandy asking me if I could stay until the Saturday, but regretfully I said no, I had to return to Devon.

  The next morning, after breakfast, my mind was full of the previous night and I realized that this was no conference pick-up, no start of a one-night stand, and no casual liaison. Here was someone with whom at last I really could share the remainder of my life. I telephoned home to Coombe Mill and said I would not be back until Saturday lunchtime, and then wrote a brief note. ‘Sandy, it’s okay, I can stay over until Saturday morning.’ The rational side of me questioned my impetuosity, but instinct insisted that I was right, and I passed the note to her during one of the talks at the Town Hall meeting. I quietly made my way out of the hall, and waited. When the talk was over she slipped out and joyfully we made our plans for the day to come. Later that morning, Mother Theresa gave a talk, and in it she chastened us over ‘our concern for the Earth’. We needed, she said, ‘to take care of the poor, the sick and the hungry and leave God to take care of the Earth.’ This was more than I could take and, inspired by Sandy’s acceptance of my proposal, so to speak, I waited for her speech to finish then rose and said, ‘I must disagree with the reverend lady. If we as people do not respect and take care of the Earth, we can be sure that the Earth, in the role of Gaia, will take care of us and, if necessary, eliminate us.’ Perhaps I should not have done so, but somehow I felt that there was a need to speak out for the Earth, and who better to address it to than that most humanist of people, Mother Theresa. She did not reply.

  That lunchtime in the refectory, I sat at the high table at Wilfrid’s invitation. There I met one of the benefactors of the conference, Mr Nomura. I sat opposite him but his English was limited and my Japanese, of course, negligible, and very little conversation actually took place. There were more workshops in the afternoon, and that evening I attended a reception in the library of Christ Church. I was somewhat dismayed to find that Sandy was not there, and my imagination worked overtime on dismal scenarios. Fortunately, I was distracted from these unproductive thoughts by Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford. I have long enjoyed his thoughtful and thought-provoking sermons, and I was so glad to receive from him the same wisdom in our conversation on environmentalism. I kept looking for Sandy around the room, but she was not there and, regretfully, when people were beginning to leave the room, I went on to the refectory for dinner. By then nearly all the seats were taken and I was obliged to sit between two people I didn’t know—I spent a rather desultory and ineffectual dinner, alone in effect.

  After dinner, we met on the steps of the hall and all was light again. Sandy said that an administrative problem had delayed her and stopped her attending the reception. We went together to the Junior Common Room, where there was a musical evening. Both of us thought of music in classical terms, but we soon found it was to be trendy, guitar-playing Evangelism. For reasons I do not understand, the Church, despite its heritage of some of the world’s best music, now tolerates country and western, protest, and junk music, all assumed to appeal to the young. When a performer rose, strummed his guitar, and announced that he would sing a song about injustice, I turned to Sandy and asked, ‘Do you like this?’ She shook her head and said no. I replied, ‘To me, it’s just whingeing to music.’ We took each other’s hands, quietly left, and made our way to Sandy’s room in the Peckwater Quad. I sat on the worn settee one expected of a student’s room, and Sandy made me a cup of tea. The tea was Earl Grey, which I detest, but I was too much in love to notice at the time. We talked freely, without any hesitation, and we seemed wholly at ease with one another and suffered none of those awkward pauses searching for appropriate things to say. Even silences were comfortable in the way they are with old friends or partners of a good marriage. We hugged but no more, for we knew that the next day we could meet privately at the Randolph.

  I spent the morning being filmed by Jean Parr and her cameraman for the Conference record, at a site near the river just south of Christ Church. I cannot remember whom I had lunch with, but afterwards there was more filming, after which I walked to a wine merchant and there bought a bottle of vintage Krug champagne and took it back to the Randolph, together with some cheese and grapes and a few things to eat. I was frustrated afterwards at Christ Church in the quad waiting for Sandy to finish all her duties. She and Wilfrid were the last to leave and, even though it was April, it was already dusk. Eventually we made our way back to the Randolph, and by then it was dark. Sandy went to her room and shortly afterwards, knocked on the door of mine. We sat on the settee of our suite, toasted each other in Krug, and exchanged our ceremonial gifts. S
andy had brought me a copy of VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and the book by Walter and Dorothy Schwarz entitled, Breaking Through, and I gave her an audiotape of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. We talked and nibbled at the cheese and grapes, but not for long. Soon we were in bed for a riotous night. Awake for most of the time, we repeated our love-making. In the intermissions, we told each other limericks and laughed … and laughed.

  There was something wonderfully cosy about breakfast in the Randolph the next morning. We sat near the window, looking out on to the street as the early workers hustled by in the rain. We watched it pouring down the windows in between gazing at each other. We knew that in thirty minutes we would part, but it hardly seemed to matter. For the first time in a lifetime, I had fallen deeply in love and had it requited in full. I knew that this was real—not sex after the seminar for two hungry delegates: it was a total commitment and in our hearts and in our genes we knew that it was a perfect marriage. In haste, we packed and checked out. The taxi took us too fast to Oxford station and our tightly held hands tried to hold back time. There we parted full of sad euphoria, knowing that we would soon meet again, but not where.

  I dozed in the train to Reading, the connecting station for the Great Western line, and slept from there to Exeter. Sadly, I drove the forty-five miles to Coombe Mill where Helen was facing, although neither of us knew it then, the last months of her long fight against multiple sclerosis. Our marriage had long since changed into a relationship more like that of brother and sister. I dreaded going home after any absence, even after a few days, for so often a further episode of MS had moved her remorselessly further into decline, and I feared what I should see. Somehow, always, I felt personally responsible and guilty for having been away when it happened. Now things were changed. For me, there was the possibility of a new and fulfilled life emerging, where previously in our sad, shared marriage time passing could only lead to the death of one of us, and a lonely old age for the other. I said nothing to Helen of Sandy, partly because it all seemed too good to be true, and partly because I did not have the heart to add further to her burdens.

  I spent the weekend in a daze, and on Monday I called to speak to Sandy at her office in London. I was on edge, fearing to hear that ‘Oh, well.’ Now that she had been home with her husband I feared she had changed her mind. Not a bit of it, she was—as ever, full of joyful enthusiasm. After we had spoken I wrote a love letter and put in it a peacock’s feather and some pictures of Coombe Mill. Now that I was home, I had time to wonder what it was about Sandy that made me love her so much. I knew that at this stage it was mostly intuition, for I had no idea how she was in other circumstances. She must, like me, have many faults, but so far the only one I had noticed was an overactive attention to detail. I thought then, and still do, that on the crack of doom Sandy would first make sure to turn off the gas, lock the house door, and feed the cats before going to meet her fate. Cognitive dissonance made me disregard this trait as utterly unimportant, and to me she was everything I had ever dreamed of in a woman. Time has proved my intuition right.

  Work as an independent and at a site so remote as Coombe Mill has always involved me in much travelling, and it was not necessary for me to change things so that I could meet Sandy. The next week I was due to go to Liverpool University to visit Ann Henderson-Sellers, the Professor of Geography, in her department there. Ann was amongst the most eminent of the climatologists in the UK and, sadly for us but not for her, we were about to lose her to Australia. This was my last chance to talk before she left the United Kingdom. I drove to Exeter on that Monday, caught the London train, and by 12.30 had arrived near the ticket office on Westminster Underground Station, where Sandy had arranged to meet me. I was facing the entrance from Westminster Bridge Road, and full of that extraordinary euphoria of courtship, when Sandy appeared. She was to me an image of delight as she came through the station entrance, and we walked arm-in-arm across the bridge that Wordsworth found so entrancing in his sonnet:

  Earth has not anything to show more fair:

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

  A sight so touching in its majesty.

  His excitement could not have matched mine as I floated, not walked, to the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) building on the Thames embankment. Sandy and Wilfrid had well-equipped offices there, as was befitting their formidable task of managing so magnificent a conference as the Global Forum, and I began to appreciate what a talented woman she was. We lunched at the IMO canteen with Wilfrid, and afterwards spent a few moments in Sandy’s office in as close an embrace as we could manage in that busy place. Our bodies cried out for each other, and we arranged to spend a night at the Randolph again on Thursday, when I returned from my travels in the north. Sandy came with me to the bus stop outside the IMO and I left to catch the train from Euston station.

  Mary Benbow, one of Ann’s postgraduate students, met me at Liverpool station, and took me in her car to a hotel near the university where Ann had booked me in. She was unusually adult, well dressed, and well spoken for a postgraduate student. I was to be the external supervisor for her PhD examination and we had a working dinner at a nearby restaurant, while Mary showed me the computer printouts of her thesis work. She had chosen as her subject ‘Modelling the dimethyl sulphide feedback loop’. I thought she was brave, in view of Gaia’s unpopularity with academics and because I would have been disappointed by anything less than competent. The next day I spent with Ann at the university, and on Wednesday morning, Mary Benbow’s father took me from my hotel by car to my next appointment at the Thornton Research Centre of Shell, near Chester.

  Immediately on arrival, I went to see the Director, Colin Quinn. He was a good friend and I knew him well from the twenty-four years of visits to Thornton. One topic of our conversation was the corrosion of the steel legs of platforms in the North Sea used for oil and gas extraction. It was beginning to look, according to the Shell scientists, as if algal growth on the steel was to blame. I was then President of the Marine Biological Association, and my mind turned to the possibility of a research contract for its beleaguered laboratory in Plymouth. Neither Colin nor I then knew how crucial is the element iron for algal growth, and how well received would be the gift of a steel platform to hungry marine life. It was interesting to think that many years later Greenpeace and the German Greens were foolish enough to protest against the burial of the old Brent Spar rig in the ocean—almost as foolish as to protest on vegetarian grounds against feeding meat to the lions at the zoo. I had many friends at Thornton Research Centre, especially Ted Adlard, with whom I looked forward to talking about separation science, and hearing the gossip about Thornton and Shell.

  The next day, Thursday, I continued my discussions in the morning, and after lunch the Shell driver took me to Runcorn station to catch the train back to London and to Sandy. We met on Euston station and it was the first of many mainline train station meetings—shades of Brief Encounter. We flew into each other’s arms on all of these, regardless of suitcases and other passengers. Soon we were at Paddington and on the Oxford train bound for the Randolph again. After a brief and light meal in our suite we went to bed for an orgy of lovemaking that lasted all night. We were so physical that early in the morning, Sandy cricked her back, and pain spoilt what should have been a cosy and slow breakfast. Deeply concerned, I took the train to London with her, and saw her into a taxi for her journey home to Putney—at moments like this separation was extra hard to take.

  Back at Coombe Mill, there was time to think about the extraordinary events of the past few weeks. The year before, when life had been unusually bleak, my friend Ricardo Guerrero had sent to cheer me a translation of a Homeric verse. It said, more or less, ‘the man who is true to Gaia will be rewarded with all manner of material things but most of all with the best of women with whom he will enjoy a long and prosperous life’. In the discomforts of the 1980s, it came as a warm and kindly thought from a good friend in Barcelona, and though I wel
comed it, I thought no more about it than I would the predictions of a fairground gypsy fortune-teller. Now it seemed there was the probability of a new life with a light and comely woman, whose quality and virtues matched my model of a perfect mate, and who I was in love with as never before. Anyone meeting Sandy would have seen a slender, good-looking woman with a warm and pleasing manner and whose voice had that melodious quality of a professional singer. I saw and heard her then, and still do, through numinous effulgence that defies and deplores description. I knew that together we were more than the sum of our two persons. We were a domain: something so good that we must sustain it for the rest of our life together.

  My calendar was empty of visits away until May, when I was due to attend a Lindisfarne meeting in Perugia in Italy. I wondered whether Sandy would be able to spend the week away with me; it would be our honeymoon. I hoped that the leader of Lindisfarne, Bill Thompson, and the other Fellows would welcome us. By now we were so committed that, in the words of that song Haitian Divorce, ‘So in love the preacher’s face turned red.’ True, we had both experienced many years of celibacy, through no fault of our spouses, who through illness and for physical reasons, were unable to participate. We both knew that what we did was wrong, but we were sure that it was more than the mere sexual gratification of a brief affair. We knew we had a real and deep relationship, a rare event in any lifetime. Now, as I write this nearly twelve years later, we are as much in love as ever, and we like to think that our domain is good enough in itself to have inspired and heartened those who witnessed it. Christine and John, who were close to me and to Helen, were shocked, but understood. My other children, Jane and Andrew, who lived far away and saw less of the long and hideous years of Helen’s decline, were more censorious. They seemed to see me as a betrayer of their mother in her time of trial. Time seems to have healed their hurt and anger, and these hard feelings were, in any event, limited to my own children. Helen’s sister, Betty, and David Orchard’s sister, Sheila, are, and have been throughout the years, our closest friends.