The Anthropocene Reviewed(10)

Maybe the novel knows this. It is, after all, a book about hearkening back to a past that never existed, trying to fix some single moment from the past into permanence, when the past is neither fixed nor fixable. And so maybe the novel knows that hearkening back to these transitory enchanted moments is a doomed enterprise. Maybe the Plaza knew they were making a room about (and for) the baddies.

But I will confess this endless parsing of ambivalences and ironies exhausts me. Here’s the plain truth, at least as it has been shown to me: We are never far from wonders. I remember when my son was about two, we were walking in the woods one November morning. We were along a ridge, looking down at a forest in the valley below, where a cold haze seemed to hug the forest floor. I kept trying to get my oblivious two-year-old to appreciate the landscape. At one point, I picked him up and pointed out toward the horizon and said, “Look at that, Henry, just look at it!” And he said, “Weaf!” I said, “What?” And again he said, “Weaf,” and then reached out and grabbed a single brown oak leaf from the little tree next to us.

I wanted to explain to him that you can see a brown oak leaf anywhere in the eastern United States in November, that nothing in the forest was less interesting. But after watching him look at it, I began to look as well, and I soon realized it wasn’t just a brown leaf. Its veins spidered out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize, and the more I looked at that leaf with Henry, the more I was compelled into an aesthetic contemplation I neither understood nor desired, face-to-face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder.

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

Still, I’m fond of our capacity for wonder. I give it three and a half stars.





LASCAUX CAVE PAINTINGS



IF YOU’VE EVER HAD OR BEEN A CHILD, you are probably already familiar with hand stencils. They were the first figurative art made by both my kids—somewhere between the ages of two and three, my children spread the fingers of one hand out across a piece of paper, and then with the help of a parent traced their five fingers. I remember my son’s face as he lifted his hand and looked absolutely shocked to see the shape of his splayed fingers still on the paper, a semipermanent record of himself.

I am extremely happy that my children are no longer three, and yet to look at their little hands from those early artworks is to be inundated with a strange, soul-splitting joy. Those pictures remind me that my kids are not just growing up but also growing away from me, running toward their own lives. But I am applying that meaning to their hand stencils, and the complicated relationship between art and its viewers is never more fraught than when we look deeply into the past.

In September of 1940, an eighteen-year-old mechanic named Marcel Ravidat was walking in the southwestern French countryside, when his dog, Robot, disappeared down a hole. (Or so the story goes, anyway.*) When Robot returned, Ravidat thought the dog might’ve discovered a rumored secret passageway to the nearby Lascaux Manor.

And so a few days later, he returned with some rope and three friends—sixteen-year-old Georges Agniel, fifteen-year-old Jacques Marsal, and thirteen-year-old Simon Coencas. Georges was on summer vacation and would soon return to Paris for the school year. Jacques, like Marcel, was a local. And Simon, who was Jewish, had sought refuge with his family in the countryside amid the Nazi occupation of France.

That day, Agniel later remembered, “We descended with our oil lamps and went forward. There were no obstacles. We went through a room and then by the end we found ourselves in front of a wall and saw that it was full of drawings. We immediately understood we were in a prehistoric cave.”

Simon Coencas recalled, “With my little gang . . . we were hoping to find a treasure. We found one, but not the one we thought.”

In the cave, they discovered over nine hundred paintings of animals—horses, stags, bison, and also species that are now extinct, including a woolly rhinoceros. The paintings were astonishingly detailed and vivid, with red, yellow, and black paint made from pulverized minerals that were likely blown through a narrow tube—possibly a hollowed bone—onto the walls of the cave. It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least seventeen thousand years old. One of the boys recalled that in the flickering of their oil lamps, the figures seemed to be moving, and indeed, there is some evidence that the artists’ drawing techniques were intended to convey a kind of flip-book animation by torchlight.*

Just days after the cave’s discovery, Simon Coencas and his family, fearing the growing Nazi presence in the countryside, moved again—this time to Paris, where relatives had promised to help hide them. But the family was betrayed by a business partner, and Simon’s parents were murdered by the Nazis. Simon was imprisoned for a time, but narrowly escaped the death camps and survived the rest of the war hiding in a tiny attic room with his siblings. He would not see his three friends from that Lascaux summer for forty-six years.



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So there were four boys who discovered the cave, but only two who could remain there—Jacques and Marcel. They were both so profoundly moved by the paintings that all through that fall and winter, they camped outside the cave to protect it. They only left after a reinforced door was installed at the cave’s entrance. In 1942, Jacques and Marcel joined the French Resistance together. Jacques was captured and sent to a prison camp, but both survived the war, and when they got home, they both immediately returned to the cave.