“Oh, there’s plenty of competition for this mouse, Jared—other insects, microbes, many vertebrate scavengers. The flies are especially bothersome, because they may have laid their eggs in the mouse’s fur before the beetles came along. Fortunately—but not surprisingly—the beetles themselves are supplied with egg-sweepers, mites that make their homes right on the beetles and that live on flies’ eggs. The mouse, the beetles, the mites, and the flies are all inspiring embodiments of the Law of Life.”
I thought about this last statement as we made our way back to the clearing. “I’m afraid I don’t see what makes these creatures embodiments of the law,” I told her.
“The Law of Life in a single word is: abundance.” When no more was forthcoming, I asked if she’d elaborate on that a bit.
“A useful exercise would be for you to go back to the mouse carcass and bring back one of the beetles. Then I’d have you pick off a couple dozen of the beetle’s phoretic mites so you could examine them under a microscope.”
“What would I learn from that?”
“You’d learn that each mite—such an inconsiderable creature!—is a work of so much delicacy, perfection, and complexity that it makes a digital computer look like a pair of pliers. Then you’d learn something even more amazing, that, for all their perfection, they aren’t stamped out of a mold. No two of them are alike—no two in all the mighty universe, Jared!”
“And this would be a demonstration of … abundance?”
“That’s right. This fantasti
c genetic abundance is life’s very secret of success on this planet.”
We trooped on. After a few minutes I realized we’d left our clearing far behind. Before long we were back on the public paths.
B said, “I haven’t done nearly as well as I thought I would tonight, Jared. I haven’t shown you a tenth as much as I hoped. Tomorrow will be better.”
Friday, May 24 (ten P.M.)
One of the bad ones
The hotel dining room was open by the time I finished the previous entry, so I went down for some breakfast, then came back to the room and slept till midafternoon. At the theater everyone was disheartened because they’d failed to get the announcement of B’s talk in today’s paper. It’ll appear tomorrow, but everyone knows this means the turnout will be even more dismal than expected.
I was frightened looking at B. She was wafer pale, nervous, and visibly shrunken, as if she’d aged ten years overnight. The life had gone out of her hair and her eyes, and I thought I saw a tremor in her left hand. Until then, in truth, I’d never really believed in her illness. Now I thought she should be in a hospital bed—or at least in some bed, with someone bringing cups of tea laced with honey, stoking a small, cheery fire, and reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows.
Around five o’clock she suggested that we get out of there, and I asked to where. When she said the park, I asked if she really felt up to that. She gave me a sharp look and half of an angry reply, then seemed to realize I hadn’t earned it.
“I have my good days and my bad days,” she said, with the air of making an admission. “Up to now you’ve only seen the good ones.”
All the same, we took the Mercedes instead of walking. On the way, B asked if I was a theologian.
“Me? No way.”
“That’s too bad,” she said without further explanation. “I know Charles made this point, but I’m going to make it again: When St. Paul brought Christianity into the Roman world, very fundamental ideas were already in place there. The idea of gods as ‘higher beings.’ The idea of personal salvation. The idea of an afterlife. The idea that the gods are involved in our lives, that their help can be invoked, that they’re pleased or offended by things we do, that they can reward and punish. Notions of sacrifice and redemption. These were all things that Paul didn’t have to explain from scratch.”
I thought I saw where she was headed. I said, “Whereas, working with someone like me, you have to struggle to unseat these fundamental ideas and to replace them with others I’ve never heard of.”
“That’s right. When Christians began sending missionaries to ‘savage lands,’ they were faced with the same difficulty I have with you. The aborigines didn’t have any idea what the missionaries were talking about.”
“That’s true.”
“Charles and I are the first animist missionaries to your world—the world of Salvationist, revealed religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism. There’s no blueprint for what we’re doing. No precedent, no catechism, no curriculum. That’s why it’s so … improvisational. We’re trying to develop the blueprint. We’re trying to figure out what works.”
“This will probably seem like a silly question, but … why? Why are you doing this?”
B drove for a minute in silence. Then: “You remember what B said: Vision is the flowing river.”
“Yes …?”
“The religions I just mentioned—the revealed religions—are fundamentally wed to our cultural vision, and I use the word wed advisedly. These religions are like a harem of sanctimonious wives married to a greedy, loutish sensualist of a husband. They’re forever trying to improve him, forever hoping to get his mind on ‘higher things,’ forever bawling him out and shaking their fingers at him, but husband and harem are in fact completely inseparable. These revealed religions clearly function as our ‘better half.’ They’re the highest expression of our cultural vision.”
“Yes, I suppose you could say that.”
“Here’s what Charles said next: ‘In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe.’ Does that make sense to you?”