Jacob Needleman - An Unknown World: Notes on the Meaning of the Earth

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JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright 2012 by Jacob Needleman

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following:

Excerpts from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky. Copyright 1949 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1977 by Tatiana Nagro. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Needleman, Jacob.

An unknown world : notes on the meaning of the earth / Jacob Needleman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical reference and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-60131-0

1. EarthPhilosophy. I. Title.

QB631.N44 2012 2012023955

113dc23

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For My Companions

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station, California, for an especially fruitful writing retreat during the summer of 2010. There, near to the Pacific Ocean and amid the rhythms of the tidal wetlands and the all-embracing green life, this book quietly carried itself forward from its very first beginnings.

Much thanks also to Charles H. Langmuir, professor of geochemistry, Harvard University, for access to the then- unpublished revised edition of How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind, co-authored with Wally Broecker, which masterfully places the question of the fate of the Earth within the vast scientific narrative of the evolving universe as our planet now either ascends or descends through human hands.

Once again, but this time even more poignantly, I am deeply grateful to my editor, Mitch Horowitz, for the kind of support that every author dreams of.

And I owe very, very much to those friends and companions who read or heard parts of this book in the making and who emanated a degree of goodwill that made me feel the wind rise at my back whenever I most needed it.

And to my wife, Gail? Everything.

Contents

Chapter One

The Low Stone Wall

A month ago, on the night of my seventy-fifth birthday, I dreamed of Elias Barkhordian. I was once again sitting on the low stone wall surrounding our neighbors lawn, where Elias and I would always go to talk about the universe. As it had been then, over sixty years ago, so it was in the dream: late afternoon in October, the sun low in the sky; in the distance the shouts of the neighborhood children at their street games. And, as it also was then, I had been walking away from the noise, pretending to be walking aimlessly, but knowing I would be meeting Elias. And as for Elias, who soon appeared from across Seventh Street where the rich people lived, he was also pretending to be just walking, and when we met we pretended to be a little surprisedthat was our ritual, played out for several years until Elias died just before his fourteenth birthday.

As we walked toward each other in the dream, I could not see him clearly; I especially could not make out his face. It was only when we sat down on the stone wall that I really was able to see him. He was as I remembered him: his big, heavy body, his large moon face; shining black hair and shining pitch-black eyes under a serene, wide forehead.

I started to talk to him, not really surprised to see him alive. I was saying something about God and the stars and the planets, about life and death and the mindour usual topics. He said nothing, but when I uttered the word death, he started aging before my eyes. I kept on talkingin the dream my words made no soundas I watched him grow older, his forehead crowding with crisscrossing lines, his eyes glowing more and more brightly. I started to feel deep grief; I thought my heart would burst, and in my sleep I could sense my chest heaving.

Elias! I shouted noiselessly in the dream, Elias! What should we do? What should we do?

He was now as old as he would have been had he still been alive. He said nothing.

Suddenly, he looked at me with a mixture of sorrow and disappointment.

I woke up. My face was wet with tears.

I COULD NOT let go of that dream. During the whole of that day I tried to recollect times the two of us had spent sitting on the stone walleven when it was covered with ice, or while snow was falling. When it was raining heavily, however, we would go to the big house he lived in, where his beautiful Armenian mother would serve us delicious cakes and strangely fragrant tea.

During the day after the dream, I went through my library and looked for any books that I still had from that period of my early life, in order to freshen my memories of my childhood friend. It was then that I knew I had to try to write about the Earth, something that for a long time I had resisted.

Surely there is no more urgent problem facing our world than our relation to the Earth. But over the years each time I turned this subject over in my mind I could not find the one great idea that would justify any attempt that I could make to add to the vast literature that now exists and continues to grow about the future of the Earth. No other question, no other crisis, has called to so many different voices, so many realms of thought and feeling, so many minds, with so many agendas and purposes, so many interconnections in economics, education, politics, philosophy, sociology, art, religion, medicine, engineering, agriculturenot to mention, of course, in the sciences of paleontology, meteorology, biology, geology, geochemistry and many others. And also: Within and above this great question stand the needs of the oppressed or downtrodden peoples of developing nations, the crisis of world poverty, the crisis of energy, the agendas of corporations, the planetary depredations of vast criminal forces, the call to far-reaching social activism, the ominous facts of pollution and world population, the accelerating crisis of water...