I Have Landed Read Online Free

grandfather at age thirteen, fresh off the boat and through Ellis Island, but unknowingly “banked” for a potential realization that required two generations of spadework, and then happened to fall upon me as the firstborn of the relevant cohort—a tale that could not be more personal on the one hand, but that also, at the opposite end of a spectrum toward full generality, evokes the most important evolutionary and historical principle of all the awe and necessity of unbroken continuity (essay 1, my
ave atque vale
).
    Finally—and how else could I close—if I found a voice and learned so much in three hundred essays (literally “tries” or “attempts”), I owe a debt that cannot be overstated to the corps of readers who supplied will and synergy in three indispensable ways, making this loneliest of all intellectual activities (writing by oneself) a truly collective enterprise. First, for showing me that, contrary to current cynicism and mythology about past golden ages, the abstraction known as “the intelligent layperson” does exist—in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning (indeed to a virtual definition of life as the never-ending capacity so to do); we may be a small minority of Americans, but we still form multitudes in a nation 300 million strong.
    Second, for the simple pleasure of fellowship in the knowledge that a finished product, however satisfactory to its author, will not slide into the slough of immediate erasure and despond, but will circulate through dentists’ offices, grace the free-magazine shelf of the Bos Wash shuttle flights, and assume an honored place on the reading shelf (often just the toilet top) of numerous American bathrooms.
    Third, and most gratifying, for the practical virtues of interaction: As stated explicitly in two of these essays (1 and 7), I depend upon readers to solve puzzlesthat my research failed to illuminate. Time and time again, and unabashedly, I simply ask consumers for help—and my reward has always arrived, literally posthaste (quite good enough, for the time scale of this enterprise does not demand e-mail haste). As the first and title essay proves—for the piece itself could not have been written otherwise—I have also received unsolicited information of such personal or intellectual meaning to me that tears became the only appropriate response.
    In previous centuries of a Balkanized Western world, with any single nation sworn to enmity toward most others, and with allegiances shifting as quickly as the tides and as surprisingly as the tornado, scholars imagined (and, for the most part, practiced in their “universal” Latin) the existence of a “Republic of Letters” freely conveying the fruits of scholarship in full generosity across any political, military, or ethnic divide. I have found that such a Republic of Letters continues, strong and unabated, allowing me to participate in something truly ecumenical and noble. And, for this above all, I love and admire you all, individually and collectively. I therefore dedicate this last volume “to my readers.”

I

Pausing in Continuity

1
I Have Landed
    A s A YOUNG CHILD, THINKING AS BIG AS BIG CAN BE AND getting absolutely nowhere for the effort, I would often lie awake at night, pondering the mysteries of infinity and eternity—and feeling pure awe (in an inchoate, but intense, boyish way) at my utter inability to comprehend. How could time begin? For even if a God created matter at a definite moment, then who made God? An eternity of spirit seemed just as incomprehensible as a temporal sequence of matter with no beginning. And how could space end? For even if a group of intrepid astronauts encountered a brick wall at the end of the universe, what lay beyond the wall? An infinity of wall seemed just as inconceivable as a never-ending extension of stars and galaxies.
    I will not defend these