Concerning Vanity, and Two Young Men Twenty Centuries Apart
I.
He was alone for this one, which is itself worth noting, because the chronicle has recorded him mostly in council, in argument, in the company of servants who exist to be reported to. This is the other kind of hour. He has them too. No one comes to him in them and he does not send for anyone.
He had the Preacher’s words in his mind, which he keeps there more than any human being would suspect, because no one has ever described his own domain more precisely than the man who owned everything and found all of it to be vapor.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
He has watched that sentence prove itself for three thousand years and it has never once failed him, and there is no comfort in that, because a truth that a creature can only confirm and never escape is not a comfort. It is a cell with very good lighting.
He went out to look at the present instance of it.
II. THE ARENA
He stood in the noise of a basketball arena in the year he found himself in, among nineteen thousand people on their feet, and he watched them for a long while before he permitted himself the thought, because he wanted to be sure of it before he let it in.
Most of these are mine.
Not all. He could feel the few who were not — small, scattered points in the crowd that did not shine, exactly, but did not have the same texture as the rest, a difference he has learned to read the way a man reads temperature with the back of his hand. A woman four rows up who had come with her son and would rather have been almost anywhere else and was there anyway, because he had asked her to come, and this was itself a small quiet act of the kind the chronicle has recorded before and will record again. A man near the tunnel who was praying, without appearing to, for the player limping toward the bench.
But the great mass of the noise was not aimed at anything that could receive it, and he stood inside the noise and did the thing he almost never does, which is wonder without any contempt in the wondering at all.
Look at what they are giving it.
Full-throated. Total. A grown man three seats down had both hands on his own head and was shouting a name into the air with an intensity the chronicle has heard directed at almost nothing else in an ordinary week — not at a grave, not at a wedding, not in a hospital corridor at three in the morning. He had never once heard that man make that sound about anything that would matter to him in five years.
And a boy, catching a ball thrown from ninety feet, receiving all of it — nineteen thousand throats at once, arms up, a whole building come to its feet for a man who would not remember any of their faces by morning.
Not one word of it went upward.
“I didn’t have a second chance,” he said, to no one, in the noise, “and I have never once wasted a moment regretting that I don’t. There is nothing in me that grieves the shape of my own sentence. It is what it is and I settled the question of it before your sun was hung.
“But you have one. Every single one of you standing in this building has the one thing I will never again be offered, still open, still available at the hour I am watching you, and you are spending it on a man who cannot dribble a ball into eternity.”
There was no cruelty in the thought and the chronicle wants that recorded precisely, because it would be easier to write him as delighted by this and he was not delighted. He was doing the thing that is nearest to grief that a creature like him is able to do, which is a kind of bottomless, uncomprehending confusion — not moral outrage, not glee, but the sensation of watching a species do, with total sincerity, a thing that made no sense to him at all, over and over, in every generation, without exception, since the very first of them stood in a garden and reached for something that was never going to satisfy the reaching.
III. THE FESTIVAL
He had seen this before. He has always seen this before, and the sameness of it is the entire subject of this chronicle, so he let the memory come rather than push it away, the way he sometimes does when a thing amuses him more than it wounds him.
Corinth, in the noise of a festival, twenty centuries earlier, in weather he still remembers on his skin though he no longer has skin in any sense a man would recognize.
He had owned that hill outright. There is a sentence written about him in one of their letters to a congregation in a city not far from that one, and he has never disputed a word of it — I know where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is — and it was true, and it had been true for a long time before it was written down, and he had liked it being true.
The altars in that country had smoked constantly. Every feast, every civic occasion, every marriage and funeral and birth was an excuse for another one, and he had stood in the smoke of every kind of sacrifice a man can devise and been, in the fullest sense available to him, satisfied.
Their own apostle had written the truest sentence ever composed about what that smoke actually was, and the Devil has never once been able to argue with it, though he has spent two thousand years wishing he could: the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God.
Not to nothing. That is the part men always misunderstand about idolatry and it is the part he has always found almost funny, in the flat way he finds things funny. They imagined they were reaching upward toward something magnificent, carved in the shape of a god with a name and a myth and a temperament. And every single time, without exception, in every nation, under every sky, what actually received the offering was him, or one of his, standing exactly where the altar pointed, taking what was never going anywhere else.
He had relished it. There is no other honest word for what that felt like from the inside — an entire civilization organizing its highest hours, its best wine, its finest animals, its most solemn language, and delivering the whole of it to his door, convinced they were addressing heaven.
And then it thinned.
Not all at once. He remembers it exactly the way it happened, which is slowly, and then everywhere, in a manner that no single defeat could account for. A handful of men who would not burn the pinch of incense. A woman in a marketplace who told a customer, without raising her voice, why she would not attend the feast that year. A physician’s letter, copied and passed hand to hand, that used the word idols the way a man uses the word poison.
He had tried the amphitheaters. He remembers that with a clarity that still, after two thousand years, produces something close to what a human being would call frustration — the crowds, the sand, the specific screaming he had engineered to terrify the movement out of the empire within a generation.
It had the opposite effect, every time, in every city, and he still does not fully know why, though he has a theory he does not enjoy and has never spoken aloud in council: that the manner of their dying was itself a kind of preaching, louder than any sermon, and that men who watched it happen went home unable to stop thinking about a joy they had witnessed in people who had every reason, by any ordinary accounting, to be in despair.
The altars kept smoking for a while after that. But the crowds around them got thinner every decade, and the letters kept circulating, and by the time three more centuries had passed, the hill he had owned outright belonged to somebody else’s name entirely, and he had never once forgiven the century for it.
The gospel went in deepest exactly where I was strongest, he thought, standing in the arena, watching a different crowd raise their arms at a different altar. That has never once stopped being true and I have never once found the reason for it.
IV. THE ONE HE COULD NOT MOVE
He shifted his attention, the way he does, across a hundred rooms in the same hour, and one of them held a man he already knew.
Twenty-six years old. A believer, and an inconvenient one — he had sent servants after him before, more than once, and the reports had never satisfied him. The man fell; that was not the trouble. Every man falls. What irritated him was the persistence, the way this one kept returning to the same floor and getting up off it in the same posture, refusing to stay down in any of the ways that would have made him useful.
He was at a gathering that night. Not participating in most of it — off to the side, in a chair near a window, with a small book in his hand, writing.
The Devil looked at what he was writing, the way he can, and it was Ecclesiastes. The man had been working through it for weeks, and that night, in the noise of other people’s celebration, he had written a single line and underlined it:
All is vanity.
And beneath it, in his own words, a short prayer — not eloquent, not composed for anyone else’s eyes, the kind of sentence a man writes only because he means it and has nowhere else to put it: Lord, wake them up. Let them see what’s actually here.
The Devil stood over that chair and felt something rise in him that he does not enjoy naming, because naming it requires him to admit how old the feeling is.
I have seen this before.
Not similar. Not comparable. The same.
V. DARIUS
The memory did not arrive gradually this time. It came all at once, whole, the way the oldest and worst of them do.
A city under the same empire, at a festival for a different god this time — not the hill he had owned outright, but a lesser gathering, provincial, loud with the same wine and the same music and the same total, unexamined sincerity he had just watched in an arena two thousand years later.
A young man named Darius, twenty-six years old, standing at the edge of it.
He had not been given a stage. He was nobody of any particular note in that city — not a bishop, not a teacher whose name would be carried into any book, a young man with an ordinary trade who had come to that gathering because his family expected him and had found, once there, that he could not make himself take part in any of it.
So he had gone to the edge of the crowd, near a wall, away from the smoke of the offerings, and he had prayed. Not for himself. Not against the festival, in the sense of cursing it. He had prayed, silently, with his eyes open, watching the people he had grown up among dance in front of a stone image of a god he no longer believed was there, that they would wake up. That whatever was keeping their eyes shut would be removed. That they would see, before it was too late for as many of them as possible, what was actually standing behind the altar they were pouring their wine out to.
The Devil had stood over him that night exactly as he now stood over the man in the chair by the window, and he had felt precisely the same thing, and here is what the chronicle wants recorded plainly, because it is the entire substance of this meditation and everything before it has only been the approach to it:
He could not move him either.
Darius fell, in his own life, more than once — the record of him, thin as it is, does not pretend he was flawless, and the Devil does not remember him as flawless. He remembers a man who sinned and repented and returned to that same posture at the edge of every gathering he was ever dragged to for the rest of a short life, praying the same prayer in the same silence, until an illness took him at thirty-one in a year with no name the Devil cares to give it.
Nobody wrote a book about him. No council met in his honor. He is not in any list a modern man could look up, and the Devil is, in this narrow and specific sense, the only one still keeping his record at all — which is itself the bitterest part of the whole memory, and he does not examine that part too closely, because he does not like what is under it.
Twenty centuries. A different empire, a different god carved in a different stone, a different room entirely — and the same age exactly, the same posture exactly, the same prayer in substance exactly: wake them up. Let them see what’s here.
“You are not new,” the Devil said, to the man in the chair, who could not hear him and would not have cared if he could. “None of you have ever once been new. I have had this exact evening more times than I can number and I am forced to sit through it again in a slightly different room with slightly different lighting, and the outcome is always the identical outcome, and I have never once been permitted to become numb to it.”
VI.
He withdrew from the room and stood again, for a while, in no particular place, which is the closest he comes to stillness.
There is no new thing under the sun.
He believes that sentence more completely than the man who wrote it ever could have, because Solomon wrote it from inside a single lifetime, with a thousand wives and more gold than any king before him and none of it satisfying, and he arrived at the sentence through experience. The Devil has arrived at it through six thousand years of unbroken observation, watching the identical drama restage itself in every century, in every empire, under every sky, with the props changed and the substance perfectly, exhaustingly constant.
The crowd changes its god’s name and keeps the altar.
The boy with the ball is not owed anything and receives everything, decade after decade, city after city, in an unbroken line back through every emperor’s games and every pagan festival before them, all the way to whatever the first crowd gathered around at the base of whatever the first mountain was.
And the man at the edge of it — the one at the window, the one against the wall in Corinth’s smoke, the one two thousand years apart and twenty-six years old both times — he does not change either. He falls in the same ways and gets up in the same posture and prays the same three words in every century the Devil has ever been given to watch: wake them up.
He does not know why it recurs. That is the part the chronicle insists on setting down last, because it is the truest thing in the entire meditation and the one he would least like recorded: he has had six thousand years to find the variable that would let him finally close the case on that man at the edge of the crowd, in any century, under any name, and he has never once found it.
Solomon found that everything was vanity and grew tired.
The Devil has found the same thing, and has never once been permitted to grow tired, and that is nearer to the whole of his sentence than anything else the chronicle could say about him.
Here ends the meditation.
The chronicle offers one thing in its own voice and then lets this account stand without further comment.
The Preacher who wrote that all was vanity did not end his book there. He circled back, at the very last, to the only thing under the sun that was not vapor: fear God, and keep his commandments — for this is the whole duty of man.
The crowd in the arena is not condemned for loving a game. The vanity is not the ball, or the wine at Corinth, or the noise in either room. The vanity is spending the one thing given to every living man — the hours before his own required day — on anything less than the God who gave the hours in the first place.
Darius is not recorded in any book of men. He is recorded somewhere else, and the young man in the chair by the window, twenty centuries later, praying the same three words into the same kind of noise, does not know his name and never will, in this life.
They did not need to know each other. They were never praying to each other.
Hope in Madness — hopeinmadness.com
