At dusk the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall: That is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil, which may, however, wash into the ocean.
We live on dead people’s heads. Scratching under a suburb of St. Louis, archaeologists recently found thirteen settlements, one on top of the other, some of which lasted longer than St. Louis has. Excavating the Combe Grenal cave in France, paleontologists found sixty different layers of human occupation.
The pleasantly lazy people of Bronze Age Troy cooperated with the burial process. Instead of sweeping garbage and litter from their floors, they brought in dirt to cover the mess and tramped it down. Soon they had to stoop in their rooms, so they heightened their doors and roofs for another round. Invaders, too, if they win, tend to build new floors on roofs they’ve wrecked. By the nineteenth century, archaeologists had to dig through twenty-four feet of earth to find the monuments of the Roman Forum.
In 1870–71 when Heinrich Schliemann was digging at a site he hoped was Troy, he excavated a trench sixteen feet deep before he found worked stones. He had found the top of a wall twenty feet high. Under that wall’s foundation, he learned over years of digging, was another high wall, and—oops—another, and another. Archaeologists are still excavating Troy.
Elsewhere, the ziggurats of the ancient New East sank into the ground, settled into soft soils, and decomposed. “Every few years, the priests would have them build up a few steps higher to compensate for the sinking of the bottom story into the soil.” Earthworm tunnels lower buildings, too, as Darwin noticed. These days the heavy Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is sinking, according to the cathedral’s recent writer-in-residence William Bryant Logan, who wrote the excellent book Dirt. The cathedral’s base “is now beneath the water table,” and “a living spring” has risen in its crypt.
In Santa Monica, California, early every morning, a worker in a bulldozer plows the previous day’s trash into the beach. I saw it. He turns the trash layer under as a farmer lashes fields with last year’s leaves. He finishes the top by spreading a layer of sand, so the beach, rising on paper and Styrofoam, looks clean.
When he entered the war, Teilhard was already a priest. One dawn in 1918, camped in a forest in the Oise with his Zouave regiment, he had neither bread nor wine to offer at Mass. He had an idea, however, and he wrote it down.
Five years later, he sat on a camp stool inside a tent by the Ordos desert cliffs west of Peking. He reworked his old wartime idea on paper. What God’s priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that one day’s development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering. These the priest could raise and offer.
In China again, four years later yet, he rode a pony north into the Mongolian grasslands and traced Quaternary strata. Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Mass upon the altar of the world, “to divinize the new day.” “Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.”
Sand plunges. Sandstone plates subduct. They tilt as if stricken and die under crusts. At abyssal depths the earth’s weight presses out their water; heat and weight burst their molecules, and sandstone changes into quartzite. It keeps the form of quartzite—that milky gray mineral—to very great depths, where at last the quartzite melts and mixes into magma. In the fullness of time, magma rises along faults; it surfaces, and makes the continents that streams will one day grate back to sand.
“I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ,” Father Teilhard explained cheerfully at the end of a book in which he tracked his ideas. His evolving universe culminates in Christ symbolically. “As much as anyone, I imagine,” he went on, “I walk in the shadows of faith”—that is, in doubt. Doubt and dedication, after all, go often hand in hand. And “faith” crucially, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in a conscious and rededicated relationship to God. Nevertheless, the temptation to profess creeds with uncrossed fingers is strong. Teilhard possessed, like many spiritual thinkers, a sort of anaerobic capacity to thrive on paradox.
It was in 1928, when Teilhard was forty-seven, that his team discovered a bone from Peking Man. His partner, a Chinese archaeologist, found a man’s skull. Years before, Teilhard had unearthed the first tools, and the first hearth; now here were the first bones—the first to be found in all of Asia. Time had stuffed the skull down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian, near Peking. It was then that the team named this “Peking Man.”
They found the cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many old folk in China, even today, drink suspended-fossil-bone powders as elixirs—so-called dragon’s teeth elixirs. Consequently, paleontologists for many generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, “Where exactly did these bones come from?” In this way, one such specialist, shopping for fossils, recognized a human tooth, and his inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian—Dragon Bone Hill.
Hauling his camp cot from Peking, Teilhard lived with villagers as he directed the dig. Over the years he sorted and eventually named the fissures’ many other animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas, and “a large and small bear.”
Ultimately he was able to date Peking Man in the Pleistocene. He established the date by various methods, one of which was interesting: Among the bits of debris under, around, and above various layers of the hominid’s bones and tolls were skulls, whole or in fragments, of mole rats. He undertook his own study of the mole rats’ evolving skulls, dated them, and so helped confirm Peking Man’s dates.
The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major life’s work.
During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office—the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic (and Anglican, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Lutheran, for that matter) Church. A British historian who knew him described his “kindly and ironic grace,” his “sharp and yet benevolent refinement.”
In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for his discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty, and even exasperation: “Heads,” he said, “practically nothing but heads.”
A hundred years later, after several decades’ chaos halted the work, paleontologists from all over the world are again finding hominid bones in the Zhoukoudian caves, along with choppers and stone flakes.
Peking Man and his people walked upright; with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. The land was jungly then. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers, and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes, before the Florida peninsula rose from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed across North America. They lived before the two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, as well as the British Isles, northern Germany, and the northern United States. They lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is now extinct.
Most paleontologists believe that we—we humans in the form of Homo erectus—left Africa 90,000 years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley’s end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent, much older erectus finds in Java, China, and the Republic of Georgia seem to show, however, that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years
earlier—unless, that is, modern humans arose in Asia. These newer, more ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect to be accustomed to this sort of thing by now—this repeated knocking out of the back wall, this eerie old light cast on the long-peopled landscape.
Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then, seriatim, into China, Japan, and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. There, on a rock shelter, we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. In other words, people—erectus included—plied the Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.
“However far back we look into the past,” Teilhard said, “we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.”
During the violence and famine caused by the Japanese invasion of China, that first Peking Man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum in which it was housed. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized and drank it. Remaining, however, was a plaster cast of this skull, as there were casts of every bit of bone and tooth—forty people’s remains—that the team found by working the site for all those years. Those plaster casts have proved handy, since every single one of the actual Peking Man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in World War II. Scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine physician who tried to carry them back as luggage. The Japanese caught him, though before he went to prison camp, he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. Unfortunately, when he left prison four years later, after the war had ended, the crates had disappeared. Recent searches draw only blanks.
The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking Man. And of Christianity he said, “We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.”
Early spring 1930: Father Teilhard, wearing his clerical collar, was having afternoon tea in the Peking courtyard garden of his new friend, an American woman named Lucile Swan. He sat erect and relaxed on a bamboo chair at a rattan table, laughing and talking. We have a snapshot. In the other bamboo chair Lucile Swan turned his way; she looked mightily amused. A headband held her short, curly hair from her firm and wide-boned face. She wore an open parka and pants: It was perhaps chilly for taking tea outdoors. Her small dog, white and brown, sat at her knee watching the merriment, all ears.
He was forty-nine then; she was forty, a sculptor, divorced. It was more than a year since the Peking Man discovery. Teilhard was living in a village near the Zhoukoudian cave and coming into Peking once a week. The two had met at a dinner party and liked each other at once. “For the first time in years I felt young and full of hope again,” she recalled. She had attended an Episcopal boarding school in Iowa and, later, the Art Institute of Chicago. In Peking, she made portrait sculptures in clay and bronze, and groups of semi-abstract figures; throughout her life she exhibited widely.
Soon the two established a daily routine in Peking: They walked, took tea at five, and he returned across the city to the Jesuit house at six. Those first several years, they laughed a great deal—about, among many other things, the American comic The Little King, which Lucile found in her New Yorkers and translated for him. Their laughter carried over courtyard walls.
“Lucile was fine-featured, amply bosomed,” a friend who joined them at tea would later remember, “beloved by all who knew her, for she glowed with warmth and honest sentiment.” And Father Teilhard was “a lean, patrician priest . . . the jagged aristocrat. He radiated outward, gravely, merrily, inquiringly. And always with a delicate consideration for the other and no concern for self.”
June 1930: “Our blue tents are pitched at the edge of a fossil-bearing cliff looking out over the immense flat surface of Mongolia,” he wrote. “We work in solitude.” He knew he could not post this letter for several months, for he was tracing the wild bounds of Outer Mongolia. “Cut off from any correspondence, I feel that my Paris hopes are dormant.” He was not yet writing letters to Lucile Swan.
He had interrupted his Zhoukoudian caves dig to join an American expedition: the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews expedition. Most of his past five years he had already spent traveling with mules to dig the great Gobi marches; this new adventure would take him even farther afield. To fix Peking Man in context, he hoped to discover the geological history of the Quaternary through all of Asia. In the course of the expedition’s wild and crawling journey, which lasted most of a year, he would, in fact, find the evidence necessary to link and date Chinese and Mongolian strata.
The Andrews expedition was a step up for the monsieur accustomed to mules. They drove Dodge trucks. Strings of camels carried gas. Digging, they encountered between five and ten poisonous brown pit vipers every day. The vipers kept them alert, one team member reported. Characteristically, Teilhard never mentioned them in his letters. He liked Roy Chapman Andrews, who made his name finding dinosaur eggs. “A wonderful talker,” Teilhard described the expedition’s leader, and a hunter who, when the team lacked food, drove off into the bright expanses and returned “with a couple of gazelles on the running boards.” Teilhard’s own vitality still battened on apparent paradox. The man who said that his thirty months on the front in the Great War had made him “very mystical and very realistic,” now wrote from his blue tent in Mongolia that “rain, storms and dust and icy winds have only whipped up my blood and brought me rest.” They called the place Wolf Camp, for the wolves that, along with eagles, hunted there.
“Purity does not live in a separation from the universe,” he wrote, “but in a deeper penetration of it.”
The next year he attached himself to a rough French expedition as its geologist. The 1931 Croisière Jaune expedition took nine months and crossed Asia to the Russian frontier. Teilhard doubled his knowledge of Asia. He went so far west that he realized one day he was halfway from Peking to Paris. He and the other Frenchmen traveled by Citroën caterpillar across “great folds of impassable land.” They breached what he admired as “the unending corrugations of the Gobi peneplain and the monumental formations of Upper Asia.” They crossed a region where mountains rose 21,000 feet. The Silk Road’s northern route took them west to the Pamir Mountains as far as Afghanistan. On the road, the others reported, the paleontologist often stopped his Citroën half-track, darted ahead into the water, and picked up a chipped green rock, a paleolith, or a knob of bone.
“This vast ocean-like expanse,” he wrote, “furrowed by sharp ridges of rock, inhabited by gazelles, dotted with white and red lamaseries . . . I am obliged to understand it.” He examined the juncture where the foot of “the huge ridge of the Celestial Mountains” plunged 600 feet below sea level into the Turfan Deep. The Turfan Deep, in turn, opened into a “vast depression” in which the River Tarim lost itself in the shifting basin of the Lop-Nor.
“I still, you see, don’t know where life is taking me,” he wrote his friend Max Bégouën. “I’m beginning to think that I shall always be like this and that death will find me still a wanderer.”
Returning midwinter, the Croisière Jaune team explored an immense section of the Gobi no one had mapped. The temperature stuck between −4 and −22 degrees F. They dared not let the caterpillars’ engines stop. Twice a day they halted and stood by the mess vehicle, nearly immobile in furs, and tried to down the boiling soup in their tin mugs before it froze.
By the time he was fifty, Teilhard said, he had awakened to the size of the earth and its lands. In only his first ten years there, he had explored China at walking pace, from the Pacific to Afghanistan, and from the Khingan Mountains northeast of Mongolia all the way south to Vietnam. Returning from the Croisière Jaune expedition, he had worked all spring in Peking, and traveled throughout the fall. It was then, in 1932, three years after meeting her, that he began writing letters to the sculptor with whom he had taken tea behind that red courtyard gate.
In his salutations, “Lucile, dear friend” quickly became “Lucile
dear” and then “Dearest.” She remained “Dearest” (sometimes underlined) for twenty-three years, until he died. Their published correspondence—hundreds of letters apiece—knocks one out, for of course she loved him, and he loved her. “I am so full of you, Lucile. —How to thank you for what you are for me! . . . I think that I have crossed a critical point in my internal evolution, those past months, —with you. . . . My dream,” he wrote her, “is to make you gloriously happy.”
She translated his work. She molded in clay for science a fleshed-out head of Peking Man. For her he sounded out his ideas. One idea he returned to quite often was his commitment to his vows. “I do not belong to myself,” he told her. In an essay he wrote, “Through woman and woman alone, man can escape from isolation,” but in right passion, love will be, predictably, spiritual. “Joy and union,” he wrote her, “are in a continuous common discovery. Is that not true, dearest?”
He never broke any of his vows. (Both men and women who live under religious vows agree that while communal living irritates them most, obedience is by far the toughest vow, and not, as secular people imagine, chastity. Teilhard never had to endure twenty-four-hour communal living, as monks do; still, obedience chafed him sorely, and he confided later that to maintain chastity he had, quite naturally, “been through some difficult passages.”)
“It seems sometimes that I have to accept so many things,” Lucile Swan wrote him, while in her private journal she wrote, “Friendship is no doubt the highest form of love and also very difficult.” As the years passed, he lived in Peking and visited France for months on end; he traveled to South America, Burma, India, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Java. They both lived in Peking, for the most part, during the twenty-two years following their meeting, until 1941, when she moved to the United States. Missing him sometimes by a few days, she traveled in those years, and the fourteen that followed, to France, Rome, Ethiopia, Switzerland, Siam, London, and India. In 1952, when Teilhard was seventy-one years old, he moved to New York City, where Lucile was living and exhibiting. They met frequently. “We still disturb each other,” he wrote her from across town. Especially disturbing to her was his new and deep friendship with another woman—also an American, a novelist.