For the Time Being

In Highland New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea, a British district officer named lames Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut

N O W “Spiritual path” is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape: they stop for a sleep, or for several y

We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago when our species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term repl

Biological evolution takes time, because it requires biological generations; the unit of reproduction is the mortal and replicating creature. Once the naked ape starts talking, however, “the unit of reproduction becomes”—in the words of anthropologist Gary Clevidence—“the mouth.” Information and complexity burgeon and replicate so fast that the pri

Our generations rise and break like foam on shores. Yet death, at least in the West, apparently astonishes and blind-sides every man-bubble of us, every time. “One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war,” says Ernest Becker, is that “each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.”

People burst like foam. If yo

The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons

Possibly the magnificent accent with which I’d shouted “Mynheer” impressed him, for he spoke Dutch, none of which I understood. I spoke English, which he doubtless understood. His tanned face showed pale creases where, in the sun, he had laughed. Pleased, he thanked me, and before wandering off, he looked at me significantly. So: his look said, we

C. S. Lewis once noted—interestingly, salvifically—that the sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. That was a load off my mind. I had found it easier to contemplate the square root of minus one.

N O W There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery a