“I suppose you might say so, though I’ve never thought of it that way myself,” he said. “I think of it as a mural composed of many interrelated scenes, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. What you call ‘our culture’ appears in many of the scenes at different moments in its history, but then there are also scenes within scenes. There are scenes depicting the history of the universe, and among these there are scenes depicting the development of life on this planet. Among these are scenes depicting the emergence of the human race. Among the scenes depicting the emergence of the human race are scenes depicting the origin of hundreds of thousands of cultures, including the Gebusi and our own. Among the scenes depicting the development of our culture are scenes depicting many other things, such as the conquest of the world by our culture, such as the appearance of Salvationist religions in our culture, such as the Industrial Revolution. We move from scene to scene, we step back from the mural to try to see relationships between scenes, we move in again to focus on details, and so on. As time goes on, the whole composition begins to come together for us—but it’s not a process that has an end point. There will never come a time when we insert a final piece and say, ‘There, that’s it, every last piece is now in place.’”
We came to a stop at a sign reading MEYER—ÜBERBLEIBSELEN, whatever that was. B looked over the huge, gray, steel shutter as if in hopes of locating a button he could press to make it go away. When he didn’t find it, he began unceremoniously pounding on it with his fist. After a minute a window above shot up, and the Ghost of Christmas Past leaned out to ask in German what the hell we were doing. This I soon learned was Gustl Meyer. Meyer and B yelled at each other for a bit, in English and German, then the window was slammed shut.
B gave me a smiling nod as if to assure me that everything was going really well, then a couple minutes later the shutter clattered up and we were admitted to the dim interior of Meyer’s shop, which was stocked exclusively with the castoffs and leftovers (Überbleibselen) of museums devoted to every sort of thing except art: military history, political history, natural history, science, technology, and industry. As soon as we crossed the threshold, B started vibrating with a kind of electric joy, like a five-year-old in a toy shop, and I began to realize he was a man with the heart of a completely lunatic collector of curios. He was enchanted by a working miniature of an early “safety” elevator, by a life-size wax Neanderthaler who sat cross-legged on the floor absorbed in some hand work that was no longer in his hands, by an exquisite cutaway scale model of a copper mine, by a hideous (and wholly improbable) stuffed dodo that Meyer claimed had been made from an actual skin, by a battered one-man submarine of the Napoleonic era, by a transparent talking head that described the operation of the brain (in Dutch) while pinpoint lights within indicated the areas under discussion.
There were crates of ore samples, piles of tarnished brass instruments, boxes of disintegrating scrolls, racks of entomological specimens, tubs of fossils of every kind—and it was at one of these that B finally paused to begin rummaging in a serious way. He took out and examined trilobites, crinoids, and things I assumed were dinosaur eggs, teeth, and claws. Finally he stopped at a doughnut-sized object rather like the shell of a chambered nautilus except that it was corrugated like the curling horn of a mountain sheep.
“An ammonite,” B said, “cephalopod—same class as the nautilus.” He dropped it into my hand, saying, “Been extinct for about sixty-five million years.”
I said something brilliant, like “Really?” and started to give it back, but he turned to Meyer to ask its price. After dickering a bit, B handed him what looked like enough cash to cover dinner for two at a pretty good restaurant.
“A collector would have paid a lot more,” B explained when we were outside, “but Meyer doesn’t expect to get premium prices, certainly not from me.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?” I asked him.
“Put it in your pocket. Keep it with you, I’m not sure when we’ll get around to it.”
The wired monkey
We stopped at a nondescript Gasthaus for dinner, and B told me to have beer, not whiskey. “Did you like Little Bohemia? We’ll go there later for a real drink.”
I told him that would be fine. I think he has the impression that all of us Romish padres are booze hounds.
“I have to go back to the first piece I tried to put in place tonight,” B said. “I know it’s not s
et in solidly.”
“Okay.”
“Last night in the theater I talked about changing minds. I said that if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds—not by programs but by people with changed minds.”
“I remember.”
“It’s difficult for people to credit this notion, because they don’t see that what we have here, every bit of it—all the triumph and glory and catastrophe of it—is the work of people with changed minds.”
“I don’t see it myself,” I told him.
“I know,” B said, “that’s why we’re coming back to it. Let’s make sure we’re agreed on basic facts. The mind change I’m looking at occurred about ten thousand years ago in what has been called the Fertile Crescent—an area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers now encompassed by Iraq. It was the inhabitants of this area, ten thousand years ago, who laid the foundations of what is now our global culture. Is this what you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now I’m sure you realize that the human race didn’t originate in the Fertile Crescent. The evidence we have right now indicates pretty conclusively that the human race originated in Africa.”
“Right.”
“It originated in Africa and then very slowly spread into every part of the world: the Near East, the Far East, Europe, ultimately reaching the most distant regions—places like the Americas, Australia, and New Guinea—about thirty or forty thousand years ago. The Near East, being next door to Africa, has been inhabited by modern humans for an immensely long time, a hundred thousand years or more. This includes the area of the Fertile Crescent. Do you see the point I’m making here?”
“No, not really.”
“The area we’re looking at, the Fertile Crescent, was inhabited by modern humans for something like a hundred thousand years before our agricultural revolution began.”
“Okay. I think I understood that already.”
“I’m pointing out that the revolution we’re looking at occurred among people who had been living there for tens of thousands of years. People were living there, and a revolution occurred. The revolution wasn’t a meteorological event. It wasn’t an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. It was something that happened among people. About ten thousand years ago people who had been living in the Fertile Crescent for tens of thousands of years began to live a new way, the way I’ve called the Taker way.”
“I see that.”
“They didn’t begin to live a new way because they were starving, because, as I’ve said, starving people don’t invent lifestyles any more than people falling out of airplanes invent parachutes. And their new way to live wasn’t adopted because it was so pleasant that it was just an inevitable next step forward. What these founders of our culture fundamentally invented for us was the notion of work. They developed a hard way to live—the hardest way to live ever found on this planet.”