August 3, 2007
Con Job
Lewis Thomas, scientist and award-winning essayist, contends that our planet earth is most like a living cell (”Lives of a Cell,” Bantam). The atmosphere is its envelope, all the insides — animal, vegetable, mineral — inseparably interdependent. Gabriel Walker’s new book, “An Ocean of Air — Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere,” (Harcourt) strikes a similar vein and is about every breath we take to make that cell do its work.
The review of Walker’s book in today’s New York Times (p B30) begins, “As a metaphor for absence and nothingness, air has performed admirably for centuries. It has pulled off one of the great con jobs in human history, concealing endless complexities behind its bland, transparent facade… (Walker exposes it as) a restless, electrically charged, dynamic superhero, entrusted with the sacred mission of protecting our planet, nurturing life and even, when looked at from a certain angle, making love possible.”
“Charged… dynamic… sacred mission… making love possible,” indeed. Perhaps even beyond Thomas’s imagination. But not beyond Jesus’s, who had some thoughts, himself, around this “ocean of air.” Happily for the way languages work, the same words include breath and spirit and wind, and even more imaginatively, forgiveness, reconciliation, community and even a pretty good way of talking about God.
Holy Spirit. Not for “absence and nothingness,” but for presence and somethingness, and so far as old querulous Nicodemus was concerned, a rather unpredictable con job herself.
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