Kean hooks the reader with a question— the death of Julius Caeser and his dying question, “You too, Brutus?” Imagine, he says, the air escaping your body as you breath. “How much do you really know about this air? Feel your lungs deflate and sag inside your chest (as you breathe YOUR last breath). What’s really going on inside there?”
“Imagine you can feel the individual molecules of gas pinging your fingertips, impossibly tine dumbbells caroming off into the air around you? How many are there, and where do these molecules go?”
Our molecules, he says, blend in with the molecules of everyone on earth and all of us are re-breathing the molecules of others. And they do not disappear. Kean maintains that “our breaths entangle us with the historical past….Is it possible that your next breath…might include some of the same air that Julius Caesar exhaled when he died?” We won’t know it, of course but it’s possible because most of the air we breathe is in a ten-mile thick belt of atmosphere all around the world and the air we breathe is air someone else, somewhere else, some other time breathed.
Ten miles. That’s a lot of air. It means you and I in our lives likely breathed some of Caser’s last breath, or the breath Moses used to announce the Ten Commandments, and—if you believe they actually existed—some of the Molecules of Adam and Eve’s breath.
We breathe the same air of Thomas Jefferson, of Jesse James, of Adolf Hitler, of long-dead friends and relatives—molecules of their breaths. For some it is sobering and for others it is exhilarating to know that we are breathing some of President Trump’s breath.
It’s an intriguing suggestion. It reminds us of something Maine Senator Ed Muskie say at a 1972 Jackson Day dinner in Springfield in 1972, four years after he had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate for the presidency. His remarks at the end of his speech were so profound that I listened back to my tape and typed them. I don’t know what happened to that recording. I wish very much that I had it so I could hear again that great voice talking about “the nature of the balance that must be struck between man and man’s environment.”
He told the audience that balance had been “put most eloquently recently in a book translated from the Swedish by the University of Alabama Press.
“This point was made: that every human being carries within him 100,000 genes. These genes have given him his entire inheritance from the past; his personality, his character, intelligence, talents and skills.
“If all the genes of the two and one-half billion human beings on this planet were backed together, they would form a ball, a small ball, one millimeter in diameter. That small ball is all that holds us together, as a species.
“It is all we own, as human beings.
“And what sustains its life?
“A thin crust which so far as we know is the only place in the whole part of the whole cosmos which can sustain this kind of life. In order to portray on a desk size globe the portion of its diameter which will sustain organic life including the atmosphere, there is not a lacquer thin enough to indicate the proportions.
“All inside that coat of lacquer is the black death of the inner planet, while all outside it is the black death of outer space. We’ve not yet discovered anything duplicating this coat of lacquer anywhere within range of the technology we have developed to date.
“If it exists anywhere, it exists outside the range of anyone, any human being within his lifetime, using the most advanced technology of which we’re capable.
“This then is the dimension of our existence in this universe. The numbers of people cannot expect to endlessly exploit that think coat of lacquer and survive.
“And it is poisoned today not only by the insults we make upon our physical resources, but by the poisons which divide us against each other. We cannot survive unless we deal with both.
“I think the genius of our political system is that notwithstanding all of the evidence to the contrary today, we have demonstrated that a free people can rise to such a challenge, and I choose to believe that we were destined to develop our capacity to do so. And whether or not we will must still be the result of our own deliberate intent, and intelligence, and work.
“That is the nature of the challenge.”
The remarks have something of a contemporary ring to them and they underline some simple questions for which humans struggle to answer.
If we breathe the same air as our ancestors breathed all the way back to the beginning of humanity and before, and we live in a large but common atmosphere, why do we insist that some are more privileged to exist than others do? Why do we spend so much effort trying to prove that some of us are better than others and deserve more for ourselves at a time when we all share those molecules 17,000-29,000 in a day? We do not separate the molecules of our lives according to our differences?
Why do we waste so much of our time ignoring these basic similarities that unite us as a species?
What good does it do?
The breaths of Adam and Eve, if you believe in that origin story, or the breaths of the first protohumans are yet in our lungs. Why do we waste so many of those breaths trying to define our differences?
As I live and breathe (as my grandmother used to exclaim), I don’t know.
