II. History and the Earth
Let us define history, in its troublesome duplexity, as the events or record
of the past. Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is
modesty. At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set
our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and
fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off
tangentially–as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago–
and fall upon us in a wild embrace ending all grief and pain. We accept
these possibilities in our stride, and retort to the cosmos in the words of
Pascal [Pascal, Blaise (1623-62)]: “When the universe has crushed him
man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he
is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.”
History is subject to geology. Every day the sea encroaches somewhere
upon the land, or the land upon the sea; cities disappear under the water,
and sunken cathedrals ring their melancholy bells. Mountains rise and fall
in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers swell and flood, or dry up,
or change their course; valleys become deserts, and isthmuses become
straits. To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and
man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.
Climate no longer controls us as severely as Montesquieu [Montesquieu,
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de (1689-1755)] and
Buckle [Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821-62)] supposed, but it limits us.
Man’s ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps: he can irrigate
deserts and air-condition the Sahara; he can level or surmount mountains
and terrace the hills with vines; he can build a floating city to cross the
ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an
hour the city that took a century to build; an iceberg can overturn or bisect
the floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great
Certainty. Let rain become too rare, and civilization disappears under sand,
as in Central Asia; let it fall too furiously, and civilization will be choked
with jungle, as in Central America. Let the thermal average rise by twenty
