It’s estimated that more than a hundred billion people have walked the earth, fifty billion people since the sun shone on Shakespeare. We often hear that more people are alive today than the total of all who ever lived. This is far from true. The vast majority of human beings are dead. We lucky few here today are the ones left alive.
Two snapshots of earth from the moon a hundred years apart would not show one face the same. All the people would be new. All the smiles and the waves. But would the two pictures look so different? Everybody would be gone, yet everybody would still be here. So many billion infinities on the inside, each a tiny statistical fraction of the human biomass on the outside. So many thoughts, dreams, hopes and despairs walking around for a while then laid down again.
‘Extensive as the external is, it scarcely bears comparison, for all its sidereal distances, with the dimensions, with the depth dimensions of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be in itself almost immeasurable.’ (Rilke, Letters Vol. 2 p.342)
Ernest Becker called the human condition individuality within finitude. Man is ‘a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. . .Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways —the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.’ (The Denial of Death, p. 26)
And By Came an Angel has a passage retelling an Australian Aboriginal legend: ‘The Tree of Life once spread its branches till they reached in through the entrance door of the Sky World. Climbing this Tree, one could freely visit heaven. Ancient before the dreaming, the tree, hollow and immense, became the dwelling place of many people, and stronghold from their enemies. They built their campfires in its hollow and took comfort in their new-found refuge.
‘Then one night, a smouldering cinder set the Tree of Life ablaze. The spirit Mirrabooka ordered stars to fetch water from the sea. All night the stars laboured to put out the fire, but it burned and burned, consuming the earth, till the only way to prevent the flames breaching heaven itself was for Mirrabooka to sever the top of the Tree. Then Time and Eternity, heaven and earth, divided. Passage at will between the worlds was no more. Mirrabooka lamented what he had done, and ever since leans down from the bright arch of the southern cross, seeking to catch the hand of whoever climbs the charred and blackened tree stump, whoever has faith to leap into an empty sky.’
Imagine snapping those two pictures from the moon: the view of the blue planet, waiting the hundred years, like Dorian Gray. Or would we be someone else taking the second photo? Mostly we swim in the sea of time and space. But when by fluke the waves wash us up, like turtles on the shore, we suddenly know life on earth is life lived in the water. All the smiling tear-stained faces are rows of shining fish. All the slippery handshakes are flipper shakes. We may visit the moon. But then we are back in the water again. We wonder if we ever left. Was it a dream that we visited the moon, and found an island there? We have the photo to prove it.