For the Time Being Read Online Free PDF Page B

nurse asks another. “Isn’t it awful?” he says. “Bitter. I don’t know what they put in it.”
    The male nurse is holding a boarder baby—a baby whose mother abandoned it in the hospital, saying she would be back. Social workers try to track down such women, who often leave false addresses. This boarder baby is a boy the nurses call Billy. Billy has lived here for two weeks; his fifteen-year-old mother visited him once, early, and never returned. Unlike many boarder babies, Billy is free of fetal alcohol syndrome; he is a healthy, easygoing redhead. Every nurse totes Billy around whenever possible, and the male nurse is nowholding him up to his shoulder as he hurries from room to room, fetching and carrying. Billy is awake, looking over that shoulder at the swirling scene. His eyebrows have not yet come in, but I can see the fine furrows where they will sprout. He will soon join a foster family. The nurses will not let me hold anyone.
    Outside the viewing window, a black woman in her fifties is waving, and with her a white woman in her twenties is jumping up and down. They are trying to attract the attention of what looks to be a baked potato, but is in fact a baby wrapped in aluminum foil. This baked potato weighs three pounds, a nurse tells me; his body is a compressed handful. The aluminum foil is “to keep the heat in.” Intravenous feeding lines, a ventilator tube, and two heart monitor wires extend into the aluminum foil. He is doing well.
    Above this baby a TV screen hooked to his monitors traces their findings in numbers. The nurses read these numbers once a minute.
    Behind the window, in the hall, the black woman, dressed to the nines, has been reduced to pointing and exclaiming. The jumping white woman, wearing jeans, has been reduced to waving. After all, the baby is plainly asleep. The nurse reaches into the isolette and lifts the baby—and foil, wiring, tubes—to display him to his visitors. She pushes his knitted cap back, so a bit more of his face shows. His face is the size of a squash ball. Both visitors tilt their heads to match hisangle. Just above the nurse’s head, four Mylar balloons strain against the ribbons tied to the isolette: “It’s a boy!” the balloons say. There on a shelf with syringes and thermometers is a carton of Reynolds Wrap.
    Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
    S A N D              September, 1923: They rode back into Peking. The mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in sixty wooden crates. The paleontologist Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”
    The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, “There are only beings, everywhere.”
    Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When hewas still in college, he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came after this Ordos trip, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia but also through Java, India, and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?
    “If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should