I Have Landed (62 page)

“T
O
EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON, AND A TIME TO
every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die: a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2).

I have a large collection of antiquarian books in science, some with beautiful bindings and plates, others dating to the earliest days of printing in the late fifteenth century. But my most precious possession, the pearl beyond all price in my collection, cost five cents when Joseph Arthur Rosenberg, a thirteen-year-old immigrant just off the boat from Hungary, bought the small volume on October 25, 1901. This book,
Studies in English Grammar
, written by J. M. Greenwood and published in 1892, carries a little stamp identifying
the place of purchase: Carroll's book store. Old, rare and curious books. Fulton and Pearl Sts. Brooklyn.

The arrival of Joseph Arthur Rosenberg, my maternal grandfather Papa Joe, began the history of my family in America. He came with his mother, Leni, and two sisters (my aunts Regina and Gus) in steerage aboard the SS
Kensington
, sailing from Antwerp on August 31 with 60 passengers in first class and 1,000 in steerage. The passenger manifest states that Leni arrived with $6.50 to start her new life in America. Papa Joe added one other bit of information to the date of purchase and his name, inscribed on the title page. He wrote, with maximal brevity in the most eloquent of all possible words: “I have landed. Sept. 11th 1901.”

I wanted to visit Ellis Island on September 11, 2001, to stand with my mother, his only surviving child, at his site of entry on my family's centennial. My flight from Milan, scheduled to arrive in New York City at midday, landed in Halifax instead—as the great vista of old and new, the Statue of Liberty and adjacent Ellis Island, with the Twin Towers hovering above, became a tomb for 3,000 people, sacrificed to human evil on the one hundredth anniversary of one little lineage's birth in America. A time to be born and, exactly a century later, a time to die.

Papa Joe lived an ordinary life as a garment worker in New York City. He enjoyed periods of security and endured bouts of poverty; he and my grandmother raised four children, all imbued with the ordinary values that ennoble our species and nation: fairness, kindness, the need to persevere and rise by one's own efforts. In the standard pattern, his generation struggled to solvency; my parents graduated from high school, fought a war, and moved into the middle classes; the third cohort achieved a university education, and some of us have enjoyed professional success.

Papa Joe's story illuminates a beacon that will outshine, in the brightness of hope and goodness, the mad act of spectacular destruction that poisoned his centennial. But his story will prevail by its utter conventionality, not by any claim for unusual courage, pain, or suffering. His story is the tale of nearly every American family, beginning with nothing as strangers in a strange land, and eventually prospering, often with delayed gratitude several generations later, by accumulated hard work, achieved in decency and fairness.

Especially in a technological age, when airplanes can become powerful bombs, rare acts of depravity seem to overwhelm our landscape, both geographical and psychological. But the ordinary human decency of a billion tiny acts of kindness, done by millions of good people, sets a far more powerful counterweight, too often invisible for lack of comparable “news value.” The
trickle of one family that began on September 11, 1901, multiplied by so many million similar and “ordinary” stories, will overwhelm the evil of a few on September 11, 2001.

I have stood at Ground Zero and contemplated the sublimity of the twisted wreckage of the largest human structure ever brought down in a catastrophic moment. And I recall the words that we all resented when we had to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in fifth grade, but that seem so eloquent in their renewed relevance today. Our nation has not witnessed such a day of death since Gettysburg, and a few other battles of the Civil War, nearly 150 years ago: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The third chapter of Ecclesiastes begins, as quoted to open this piece, with contrasts of birth followed by death. But the next pair of statements then reverses the order to sound a theme of tough optimism. Verse three follows destruction with reconstruction: “A time to kill and a time to heal: a time to break down and a time to build up.” And verse four then extends the sequence from grim determination to eventual joy: “A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn and a time to dance.”

My native city of New York, and the whole world, suffered grievously on September 11, 2001. But Papa Joe's message of September 11, 1901, properly generalized across billions of people, will triumph through the agency of ordinary human decency. We have landed. Lady Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door. And that door leads to the greatest, and largely successful, experiment in democracy ever attempted in human history, upheld by basic goodness across the broadest diversity of ethnicities, economies, geographies, languages, customs, and employments that the world has ever known as a single nation. We fought our bloodiest war to keep our motto,
e pluribus unum
(one from many), as a vibrant reality. We will win now because ordinary humanity holds a triumphant edge in millions of good people over each evil psychopath. But we will only prevail if we can mobilize this latent goodness into permanent vigilance and action. Verse seven epitomizes our necessary course of action at my Papa Joe's centennial: “A time to rend, and a time to sew: a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.”

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce the images herein:

All other images appearing throughout are from the author's collection.

¹
Although Jesse, my autistic son and fabulous day-date calculator, has since pointed out to me the fascinating patterns of palindromic years. They “bunch” only at the ends of millennia—so we have enjoyed two in 1991 and 2002. Our ancestors did even better in 999 and 1001. But our descendants must now wait more than a century for 2112, as calendars revert to the usual pattern of more than a century between palindromic years. So these backward-forward years are indeed rarer and more special than I realized.

²
This essay, number 300 of a monthly entry written without a break from January 1974 to January 2001 and appearing in
Natural History
magazine, terminates a series titled “This View of Life.” The title comes from Darwin's poetic statement about evolution in the last paragraph of the
Origin of Species:
“There is grandeur in this view of life . . .”

³
This essay, the three-hundredth and last of my series, appeared in January 2001—the inception of the millennium by a less popular, but more mathematically sanctioned, mode of reckoning. My grandfather also began the odyssey of my family in America when he arrived from Europe in 1901.

⁴
Incidentally, Nabokov represented an intractable mystery to me until I learned that he grew up trilingual in Russian, English, and French—a common situation among the Russian upper classes in his day. Even as a teenager reading
Lolita
, I couldn't understand how anyone who learned English as a second tongue could become such a master of linguistic detail. Indeed, one cannot. Conrad narrated wonderful stories, but could never play with his adopted language as Nabokov did with one of his native tongues.

⁵
This article was inspired by Leigh's film at its opening in December 1999. But the film is rarely mentioned, and this article is in no way a review (the most ephemeral and unrepublishable of all literary genres). Rather, I shamelessly used Leigh's wonderful film to write the essay I always meant to compose on my heretofore private passion. This piece originally appeared in
The American Scholar
.

⁶
I greatly amused my Hungarian grandmother (see essay 1) on my first visit at about age five—when I asked her if she had worn such armor as a girl in that far-off land. My mother, after all, had told me that my grandmother was “middle aged.”

⁷
I originally wrote this article for the catalog of a retrospective exhibit of Church's paintings, displayed in Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery of Art in 1989.

⁸
And again, the universal company and republic of intellectuals did not fail me. Although Isabelle Duncan has not been mentioned in print (except as the otherwise anonymous author
of Pre-Adamite Man)
since 1915, and never in more than a cursory line or two, several scholars knew her identity from two sources: from letters of Jane Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, who both admired the book and knew the Duncan family, and through her more famous father-in-law, Henry Duncan (1774-1846), a Scottish minister and social reformer, now best remembered as “the father of savings banks” (at least according to the Savings Banks Museum in Ruthwell, Scotland.) But I then hit pay dirt when Stephen D. Snobelen, a young historian of science at Cambridge University, sent me his excellent dissertation on Isabelle Duncan, her evangelical religious views, her commitment to the concordist tradition with scientific findings and her remarkable book, which went through six editions between 1860 and 1866 (probably with a total press run of some six thousand copies—a very respectable sale for the times). Snobelen's superb detective work in this former terra incognita (including a location of her portrait and the correct spelling of her name—all previous sources had called her Isabella rather than her preferred Isabelle) has since been published as a first scholarly account of this remarkable woman's life and identity: “Of stones, men and angels: the competing myth of Isabelle Duncan's
Pre-Adamite Man
(I860),”
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences
32 (2001): 59-104.

⁹
Since writing this essay, I have asked some professional historians and have learned that, indeed, the tale of the “weapon salve” became a major issue, much discussed at the time itself, and by later historians ever since, in defining the norms and limits of scientific explanation.

¹⁰
This “viewpoint” appeared in
Time
magazine on August 23, 1999. As noted elsewhere (see page 242 n.), supporters of good scientific education defeated the creationists in the next school board election in 2000. This newly elected board immediately restored evolution to the biology curriculum.

¹¹
I wrote this short piece as an editorial to introduce a special issue of
Science
magazine on evolution. This editorial, like the preceding piece for
Time
magazine, represents my immediate reaction to the Kansas School Board's rejection of evolution in the state curriculum. I include both pieces, and present them sequentially, because I thought that readers might be interested in my sense of how the same subject can be presented to general and popular audiences
(Time)
and to professional colleagues
(Science
— America's leading technical journal, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the profession's primary “umbrella” organization).