A look out the window reveals the morning’s local climate news: the air is clear, the sky is blue, the temperature is 61 degrees Fahrenheit, and there’s a light breeze moving up the river bottom. The Sportsman’s Access parking lot next door is empty, signifying that we’ve reached that point in tourist season when word has gotten around that the fishing is lousy on this part of the river. Less traffic on the highway reflects back-to-school sales, cooler temperatures in Boise and Twin Falls, and the anticipation of county and state fairs.
Last week’s rainstorms have kept the valley green and, for the moment, not on fire. The air smells of freshly split lodgepole, as I’ve begun to cut and stack firewood for the coming winter. The lawn is mostly mowed, and the sprinkler system is working. The Sun Valley symphony is in full swing, which means that Julie and I will pack decadent picnics five or six times this month and drive to Sun Valley, there to sit on the lawn above the amphitheater and eat and drink wine and listen to classical music. Now that we have a stretch of sunny weather in the forecast, we’re taking long day hikes into the Sawtooths, whose hidden nooks and crannies afford solitude, even at the height of backpacking season.
It would be easy, from our current situation, to assume that all’s right with the world. For deep background, here’s Robert Browning’s “Pippa’s Song:”
The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His Heaven—
All’s right with the world!
This verse is excerpted from a longer, darker piece, Pippa Passes, which focuses on an abused 14-year-old female worker in a 19th century Italian silk mill. But you can’t read the excerpt completely ironically. Its few lines demonstrate that in the moment, in the microcosm, happiness and beauty is available to the poorest and most humble. It’s a bit like—and I don’t mean this completely ironically—Julie and I sitting on the Sun Valley lawn, eating caprese salad, drinking a nice Oregon pinot noir, listening to Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major played by a world-renowned violinist. Compared to the audience members who surround us—retired movers and shakers spending their golden years in a golden neighborhood, we are poorer, and, I daresay, humbler, but we’re all listening to the same music.
Julie and I are not, except in the presence of obscene wealth, poor. We’re not all that humble, either.
But there have been times in both our lives when apparently irrelevant decisions would have made us desperately poor and irrevocably humble or worse. Our lives, in the language of chaos theory, have had “a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” Given that initial conditions like ours have proven stultifying, stunting, or even lethal for other people, who would have thought that we would be here, now, on this sunlit morning in central Idaho? Who could have imagined that we would be this happy in this flawed world, or that such beauty could exist in it?
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Chaos theory tempts you to contemplate time travel. If you had a time machine, and could go back to, say, 1914, in Sarajevo, and lay in wait for Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and embrace him as an old friend (surprising him, as even then he had no friends) as he walked toward the Archduke’s carriage, that small delay would have prevented a hundred million murders or more—World War I, the fall of the Romanovs, Hitler, Stalin, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the second American Civil War.
But chaos theorists don’t require direct intervention. You could just show up Sarajevo on that fateful day and breathe. The molecules of Sarajevo air you take from 1914, however briefly, would resonate again and again in their absence until nothing would be the same in the world where you entered the machine and set the dials.
If you brushed against a person on the sidewalk, or if a policeman did a double-take at seeing your odd 21st century clothes, or if you sneezed, or tried out your high school German to order a pastry because you forgot your 21st century breakfast, the world you started out with—and the you that you started out with—would be forever gone. You might find you would be speaking German a lot more fluently, though.
It is the same with our personal histories. One trivial decision as a seventh-grader and you end up in a different city, with a different job, thinking of yourself as a different person, married to a person you never would have met, your dreams of being a fireman, an astronaut, or a ski instructor all in ruins.
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Theoretical physicists have pointed out that quantum entanglement can exist for time as well as for space, which means (I surmise) that messing with one entangled particle in the present can instantly alter its partner in the past. Such a mechanism exists (I further surmise) in the act of remembrance.
So time machines exist whenever the present gets mixed up with the past. Memory creates a reality that is one great flux of competing butterfly effects, whereby an infinity of tiny accidents struggle with each other to form an infinity of futures, picosecond by picosecond.
Our human consciousness, slowed to a crawl by the speed limits on electrical signals in the brain, will never make it to the reality of the present. That doesn’t mean we can’t mess with the past.
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Julie and I pretend we coexist with reality, especially on mornings like this one. We pretend that all’s right with the world, at least in our microcosm, even though we know that if we get in the car, drive three hours to Boise, and start wandering through the tents of the homeless in certain parts of the city, all is not anywhere near right with Boise, much less the world.
This morning’s news reports that the burned tourist town of Lahaina, on Maui, is still smoking. Hundreds of people are missing, with rising numbers of dead. Uncontrolled forest fires in Siberia and Canada are smoking up the northern hemisphere. In Iran, the heat index has hit 158 F., a combination of temperature and humidity that suggests Allah is trying to tell them something. China, Japan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Norway, Slovenia, and Hungary are experiencing thousand-year floods. NPR is having a retrospective on the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, hoping against hope that that particular part of our past is not entangled with our future.
So, yes, not all is right with the world. It probably hasn’t been since we exterminated the Neanderthals and maybe before.
And indications are that rent control has been abolished in heaven and God has been evicted, as His heavenly city is being converted to condominiums. (By whom? That’s what I’d really like to know. It could explain a lot of divine displaced anger.)
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And yet Julie and I persist, and even, for the moment, thrive. We’ll drive over Galena Summit for Mahler and more, and we’ll continue to burn petroleum, eat meat, and purchase consumer goods in a world where CO2 is rising 4 ppm a year, where humans and animals continue to spend their lives in dark Satanic mills, where Supreme Court justices take bribes, billionaires get closer to outer space than the poor get to food, and national leaders are chosen from a pool of murderous children.
Those of you reading these words now probably think they’re too strong. Those of you reading them five hundred years in the future probably think they’re appropriate.
You future people know how it all turned out. You know how horribly wrong we were, and how much our last few years of decadence cost you.
What might surprise you is that some of us knew how horribly wrong we were, too. Privately, we could admit to knowing the truth. Tribally, we could admit no such thing.
You will understand our tribalism. You practice it yourself, inasmuch as you kill and eat the slightly different human beings who make it, as refugees, to Antarctica.
You will understand why we burned coal in increasingly futile efforts to stay cool, and our increasingly desperate measures to keep industrial civilization functioning.
That sounds callous, but in our case it meant living as we had always lived in our world, obeying deep rules of behavior, rules we had been told were the stuff of existence itself.
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Critics of poetry (I used to be one) have decried Robert Browning’s naivete in giving the girl Pippa a joyous song in the harsh world she lived in, but you folks in the future (one of many futures, at this point), also know that there’s joy to be found in the microcosm, and, if you think about it, it’s all microcosm. The flower in the crannied wall exists for you, just as it existed for us, and its beauty may be even greater for you, due to its rarity and the fact that it must be pollinated by hand.
Humans can find beauty almost everywhere if they go small enough. Narrow your focus to one beautiful thing under the microscope, even if it’s the fossil of a once-living thing, and you’ll experience a moment of joy, like the doomed Pippa, and like the doomed person who wrote these words for you. (Don’t worry. I still anticipate being alive and kicking for a few more years. But I’m mortal, and so is my civilization, and the two of us are in a contest to see who makes it the longest. In 500 years, the contest will be long over, and so, too, will be your faithful correspondent.)
Moments of joy can come thick and fast if you examine the world without seeing it in context. That may have been the great trick of the last generation of our civilization. We shut out the big picture and focused on the violin solo, the executive suite, the high arc of the rocket racing toward orbit, the white city on a hill shining gold in a smoky sunset. All’s right with the world in such moments, even if such a world is too small to live in for long.
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I don’t know what the world will be like in 500 years. I’m certain there won’t be anywhere near 8 billion humans on earth, and I’m reasonably sure that nobody will be rocketing into space or operating the control room of a particle accelerator. Reading up on the difficulties of fusion technology has convinced me that fusion power plants won’t ever be practical.
Technology in general will have reverted to a few tried and true forms: hydroelectric power where the rivers still flow, gliders, gunpowder, wood-powered steam engines where there are still forests, mining the landfills where cities once were. Steel will not be recycled, it’ll be sharpened.
Salvage, especially of ideas, will be a high art. Maybe we’ll have kept and improved mathematics and quantum physics. They will be the nighttime hobbies of farmers and blacksmiths and the future equivalent of imams, who may have advanced their theories far enough to experiment with altering the past.
With luck, they’ll contact the Neanderthals. It’s only a short jump—a thousand centuries—no jump at all for an entangled particle. Mess with one, and its counterpart and the butterfly effect might get a young Neanderthal thinking about those awful new people showing up in the neighborhood.
Maybe they can be taught ethics. Maybe they can be convinced not to invent money.
Maybe that young Neanderthal will figure out a way that the microcosm, in all its beauty, can be expanded to encompass the world.
It’s our only hope.