Having Everything Right (3 page)

When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to read the West, to cross the primitive half of the continent, he sent with them a word-list he had composed so they might record a sampling of the Indian languages they encountered. But something went wrong. If they did record Indian vocabularies, their notes were lost after they returned east to St. Louis. In the Reuben Gold Thwaites edition of Lewis and Clark's
Original Journals
, we have only Jefferson's list in English. Here is the list's flavor in four passages:

The list haunts me two ways. First—because Jefferson's list is a thoughtful one—it speaks for elemental life on Earth. It names the essences and relations of creature, time, generation, event. “To kill” and “to dance” are adjacent not by alphabetical coincidence or legal code or logical necessity. They are adjacent because life requires it. “Yesterday/today/tomorrow” is the configuration of both casual conversation and sacred myth. “Yes” and “no” are two sides of one door.

Second—because Jefferson's list is in English only—it summons the inarticulate, the secret, the old, the lost names for place, custom, and story.

Once, in North Carolina, after an afternoon conversation about Captain John Smith and the colonies, about the Revolutionary War and the Tuscarora Indians all long gone to their tiny reservation in New York state, my kind hostess rattled her glass of iced tea.

“I can't help thinking,” she said, “how
we
look upon the Roanoke River every day, and savor our three-hundred-year history. It must be strange to live out West, where history is only a hundred years old, and stories only a hundred years deep.” I was chilled by a westerner's homesick knowing: a century is a veil almost thin enough to brush aside.

This book travels for place, custom, and story. As water is pilgrim, I know the urge: to visit all the places I was healed. Water travels as local inhabitant, as essence of tree, of capillary stone, of sunlight pillar in a meadow ablaze with grasshoppers. By that pilgrim's urge, I listen to my family stories, one long generation from the primitive. By that urge, I seek out the speaking places of my own country: Montana battlefield, Oregon fallen barn, North California coastal midden, Idaho eccentric's hut. I listen for the way stories would name our country. This book is the listening. The task of naming I would share with you, for the naming is the active part. I want to learn place, custom, and story for my home. I want to name it in my own tongue, “Having Everything Right.”

O
UT OF
T
HIS
W
ORLD WITH
C
HAUCER AND THE
A
STRONAUTS

       
When you overcome the earth the stars will be yours
.

       
— B
OETHIUS
,
The Consolation of Philosophy

The night Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, I was lost on some western branch of the German freeway system. I hadn't heard the news in weeks, and it was dark, cold for July, raining hard. With my small collection of words from half a dozen languages, I worked through the lot of a sprawling truckstop, tapping on doors of the big rigs to ask “
Al nord? Dirección Danmark?
” I was getting nowhere, when the Italian driver of a melon truck gave me a smile.

“You American? Eh, beautiful! You see la moon?” He pointed. The clouds had thinned out. “My radio, it say she belong to you. Apollo. . . . But the Denmark, no. Hey, good luck for you!” I turned to look up at the moon. He pulled the door shut, and I crawled off into a thicket of birches to shiver through the long night in my sleeping bag, spellbound by the moon.

What will we call home one century from now—a thicket, a nation, the Earth itself? According to a common proverb in the Middle Ages, “Most of us are at home one place on Earth, while experienced travelers are at home many places on Earth. But the truly wise are at home no place on Earth.” In that time, people thought life on Earth could only tarnish the soul. The Earth itself was corrupt, and ultimately doomed, along with those too devoted to it. Home was in heaven, and the Earth was only a perilous stopover on the soul's pilgrimage.

This attitude of contempt for the Earth had its own tradition of travel literature (providing the seeds for today's science fiction), in which a human soul casts off the body's husk in sleep or death and flies toward heaven, turning back just in time to see the world, pitifully small and poor as a freckle on the void.

I was lost in Germany, but we are lost on Earth unless we decide what we will call home. We can begin to consider what our home might be like—and to assess what we value as home—by visiting some of these early travel accounts by Cicero, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, and others. In certain ways these imaginative journeys of the past are remarkably similar to the actual travels by astronauts of our own time. We can read the image that came from Cicero's reed pen as a prophetic simulation for Apollo 11, just as the space programs of the last twenty years may prefigure the human mission in the next century.

Before Copernicus, before Christ, in the first century B.C. when Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a political tract called
De re publica
, his
sense of politics involved both the duties of the individual citizen and the plan of the cosmos. In the final chapter of his book, a character from Roman history named Scipio Africanus the Younger dreams that he has sailed out toward the stars to learn his destiny. It's wonderful out there for Scipio, and like the astronauts of our own time he reports that “the blazing stars” are far brighter than what we see from Earth. As he hovers, amazed among the stars, the spirit-forms of his father and grandfather appear, terrifying him, but then assuring and informing him: he should strive, they say, in the work of the Empire, for nothing is dearer “to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the establishment of federations bound together by principles of justice.” But as he listens, Scipio turns and looks back, and is struck by the size of the distant Earth—“so small that I was ashamed of our Empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its surface.”

Cicero was right to be skeptical about the Empire; for all his service to the state, when political enemies seized control they nailed his severed head and right hand to the podium from which he had so often—and so eloquently—addressed the Roman citizens. His “Dream of Scipio” survived, however, as a famous example of cosmology and dream-literature. The ability of this work to look simultaneously inward in dream, backward in history, and outward in cosmology was a model to be copied by medieval writers for centuries. Through the edition and commentary of a fourth-century writer named Macrobius, Scipio's Dream was known intimately by everyone seriously interested in astronomy through the seventeenth century. This included Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Kepler, and others who copied the Dream in their works. Even today, Cicero's way of looking at Earth from outside the atmosphere and yet inside the mind recurs. Though Michael Collins (the third member of the Apollo 11 team) probably never read Cicero, he describes a mental journey toward the stars in words similar to Cicero's: “I can now lift my mind out into space and look back at a midget Earth. I can see it hanging there
in the relentless sunlight.” The conclusion Collins draws from that perspective also echoes Cicero: “I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say, 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced.”

The early fourteenth century in Italy was a time of very noisy human argument. That tiny, distant world was what Dante, lifted toward heaven in his
Divine Comedy
, called “the threshing floor that makes us so ferocious,” as he glanced back at Earth from the constellation Gemini. Gemini (besides being the name of five American missions into space in 1965) was Dante's astrological birth-sign. He was in exile from his native city of Florence when he wrote about the small, scarred floor of Earth. Like Cicero, he sensed his true home among the stars, and in his vision he did not look back at Earth with longing or regret, but with relief to be away. Earth was a distant chapter in his past.

Another cosmic traveler eager to be away was the hero of Chaucer's courtly romance,
Troilus and Criseyde
. At the close of this story, the Trojan knight and lover Troilus has been killed in battle by Achilles, and his heaven-bound spirit flies up through the eight concentric spheres of the medieval cosmos, brushing aside the four material elements of earth, water, air, and fire, until he bursts out into the realm of the fixed stars and hears the “hevenyssh melodie” that drives the universe. Then he turns and glances back at the Earth:

       
And when he was slain in this way

       
His light spirit blissfully rose

       
Up to the hollowness of the eighth sphere,

       
Leaving behind on either side the elements;

       
And beyond he saw with utter attention

       
The wandering planets, harkening to harmony

       
With sounds of heaven's melody.

       
And down from there he eagerly studied

       
This little spot of earth, that by the sea

       
Is embraced, and he totally despised

       
This wretched world, and held all vanity

       
Compared to the sheer happiness

       
That is in heaven above.

Especially in my translation, perhaps, this is one of the soberest passages in Chaucer, and some readers have doubted that the author of the
Canterbury Tales
actually wrote it. In a sense, he did not. He only borrowed it from Macrobius, who borrowed it from Cicero, who borrowed it from Lucretius, who borrowed it from Plato, who got it from the Muse. Actually, Chaucer's Troilus is himself quite jolly at this point: “within himself he laughed at the sorrow / Of those who wept so sincerely for his death.” Their concerns are so distant, so tiny, blind, absurd. Troilus is jolly at the expense of those he left behind—the wretched Earth and its citizens.

With Milton in the seventeenth century, the traditional language of Cicero's cosmic vision remained, but the attitude toward the value of the Earth began to change. Where Chaucer's Troilus despised “this litel spot of erthe,” in
Paradise Lost
the angel Raphael tells Adam,

       
. . . this earth a spot, a grain,

       
An atom, with the firmament compared . . .

       
Though, in comparison of Heav'n, so small,

       
Nor glistering, may of solid good contain

       
More plenty than the sun that barren shines

       
Whose virtue on itself works no effect

       
But in the fruitful Earth.

Maybe it was Milton's blindness that brought this change of heart. Maybe it was the chill distances of space that Galileo's telescope and
Kepler's mathematics had begun to actualize. Something made Milton and his contemporaries begin to imagine that from out in space the Earth would be small, yes, very small—but somehow winsome, fertile, a garden for a good life. The Earth had been small for Cicero, but therefore worthless. For Milton's Raphael, the tiny atom of Earth holds Eden, and is a kind of heaven in small. From Milton and those who followed him, we inherit both the vision of Earth's smallness and a sense of empathy with it. A hundred years after Milton, cosmic travelers in Voltaire's
Micromegas
first sight the Earth from space: “they discerned a small speck, which was the Earth. Coming from Jupiter, they could not but be moved with compassion at the sight of this miserable spot, upon which, however, they resolved to land.”

Cosmic travel literature continued from the seventeenth century with an increasing interest in the technology thought to be required for such journeys. Johannes Kepler, best known for his discovery of the elliptical paths and other mathematical principles of planetary motion, wrote a Ciceronean
Dream
in which an Icelandic “dæmon” directs human passengers to the moon. Each must be drugged, protected from cold, assisted with breathing, and bunched like a frightened spider (or human embryo) to survive the trip. (This scientific allegory back-fired when it was used as evidence to condemn Kepler's mother as a witch; she was thrown into prison in chains.) Cyrano de Bergerac, on the other hand, imagined a series of flasks filled with dew and strapped onto the traveler's chest; when the sun warms the dew, it evaporates and rises, lifting the traveler away in this bright harness. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver describes the spindled magnet that lifts and guides the airborne island of Laputa, while Jules Verne's first moon-travelers climb inside a gigantic bullet, to be fired from a cannon sunk five hundred feet into the ground near Tampa, Florida. Somehow, all these travelers survive.

Despite technology, Scipio's dream-journey into space still seems to hover in the background for twentieth-century science fiction. For the character named Bedford in
The First Men in the Moon
, by H. G. Wells, take-off is less technological than psychological: “I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.” Similarly, the religious themes of Dante, Chaucer, and Milton reappear in more recent science fiction works like those co-authored by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (a NASA scientist turned writer):
The Mote in God's Eye
and
Lucifer's Hammer
. Even modern literature set on Earth may take a cosmic view:

       
Wait! One more look. Good-by, good-by world. Good-by Grover's Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

For contemporary audiences of Thornton Wilder's play
Our Town
, our town is the Earth itself; but this Earth is no longer the shameful speck of Cicero's vision. It is home.

“Colors startled me . . . an extraordinary array of vivid hues that were strangely gentle in their play across the receding surface of the world.” Gherman Stepanovich Titov so remembers his view of the Earth as he circled it seventeen times in 1961. The early missions went so fast, and were so filled with strict concentration on the flight controls, that the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had little time for sustained meditation on the Earth below them—John Glenn seeking out the buttons with the tiny red lights taped to his fingertips, and Yuri Gagarin glancing only at the Earth's “very characteristic and very beautiful blue halo.”

When the Apollo program began in 1967, astronauts got far enough from Earth and had enough time in space to really stand in Scipio's shoes. On March 5, 1969, Russell “Rusty” Schweickart climbed out of the Apollo 9 spacecraft over 100,000 miles from Earth. He was wearing a two-million dollar suit designed—by skill and hope—to protect him from the dangers of space. Unlike the Gemini astronauts, Schweickart had no umbilical oxygen tube leading back to the mother ship, only a simple tether. For this EVA (extra-vehicular activity), he was really outside and alone. As he stood in what they called the “golden slippers”—foot pads painted with pure gold to protect them from the searing rays of the sun—and as he gazed down long and carefully at Earth, he first told his companions inside Apollo, “That's what you call a view from the top of the stairs.”