Study in Perfect (18 page)

The truly altruistic even love others, though that love may not be as extraordinary as that of Mother Teresa, who said, “What we need is to love without getting tired.” Teresa demonstrated her compassion by touching, wrapping her arms around castaways—lepers, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS patients—bathing people who were about to die. She whispered in their ears, soothed with songs, took the time to warm the extended hands of everyone she met. With Vatican permission, she began
a small order in Calcutta with only thirteen members. At the time of her death in 1997, her Missionaries of Charity included 4,000 nuns, operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including clinics, hospices, soup kitchens, counseling programs, orphanages, and schools. She only appeared in public to guide her programs. Otherwise, she avoided the limelight. She wanted people to think of Jesus, not Teresa. In daily Mass, if you didn't know where she was sitting, you wouldn't realize she was there.

Some found her devotion to the poor difficult to believe. Did she wash her hands compulsively, calling for hot water from the kitchen when her patients made do with cold? Did she ask for any other luxuries, suppress her impatience, or silence a garrulous sister so she could get on with her tasks? I can imagine in Teresa's Calcutta office a bookshelf that conceals a small chamber furnished with cot, blankets, pillow. She nods to her sisters on the way in, and they know to keep visitors away for an hour, maybe more. One shove and the bookshelf swings open. She slips inside, hurriedly dispensing with her prayers, removing her shoes, and sinking down. She draws knees to her chest, sighs like a dog, and grabs herself a selfish nap.

Others took a dim view of both her philosophy and practice. Why didn't she work toward eliminating poverty, the source of so much suffering? The
Lancet
criticized the quality of care offered in her clinics: the reuse of hypodermic needles, poor living conditions, and haphazard medical diagnosis. In the months before her death, Teresa broke her collarbone, contracted malaria, and had open-heart surgery. When she fell ill, she made the controversial decision to be treated at a well-equipped hospital in California instead of one of her own clinics. This so concerned the Archbishop of Calcutta that on her
first hospitalization he ordered a priest to perform an exorcism because he thought she was under attack by the devil.

Faced with an extreme model of altruism, we sanctify or turn skeptic. Following Teresa's death, the Catholic Church moved toward her canonization. Journalist Christopher Hitchens was asked to testify against her in 2002, a role he would later describe as being akin to “representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono.”

The mesolimbic pathway is a primitive area of the brain that, under MRI scans, usually lights up in response to food and sex. Neuroscientists at NIH and LABS D'Or Hospital Network decided to observe this pathway during a different kind of behavior and conducted studies with normal, healthy volunteers who placed the interests of others before their own by making charitable donations of time and money. The scientists discovered that altruistic giving ignites the very same area in the brain. They published their research in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
in October 2006, noting that another brain circuit was selectively activated during the experiment: the subgenual cortex/septal region, where bonding and social attachment occur. Altruism, they suggested, is not just a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but is also a biological aspect hard-wired, pleasurable. It's comforting to know that Teresa might have experienced a physical bonus for her enormous kindness and sacrifice. The rest of us might also have something to look forward to if only we stopped thinking only of ourselves.

And how likely is that? Alas, the dinnertime admonishments over half-eaten succotash have disappeared and starving children in India still starve. Today, no one wants a son or daughter
with low self-esteem so a false glow settles over the hair of kindergartners. Sean Penn poses in a truck bed, tossing out rice for the hungry in Haiti, and fans everywhere forgive him the vanity of his vicious temper. We commit small acts of selfishness every day: dropping scraps of toilet paper on the restroom floor, stealing Splenda packets or reams of office paper, leaving divots on the golf course to dry in the sun. Side-zooming before tollbooths, texting in movie theaters, saving a seat with our coats and purses. But spear the largest pork chop off a platter while everyone is watching? That would be uncivilized.

I can't remember if Little Miss Selfish ever came around, and the book is long out of print. In my mind she remains selfish to the end, pushing shoppers out of her way, opening other people's birthday presents. Her reward and penance are the same: eternal life in a two-dimensional, bell-shaped body, glowing golf-course green. No matter the fancy shoes and sunhat. Useless the handbag with lots of room for cash. She lives to frighten children, loathed, ridiculed.

One day a woman wakes up in the middle of her life. Her mother has died, daughter suffered a life-threatening illness, husband finally sober after a long period of abuse. Shaken, she turns in a slow, wide arc, settling uncomfortably on four decades of self-centered behavior, tempered perhaps with some tenderness toward her children, husband, very best friend. She feels appropriate shame and regret.

Good, she thinks (remembering Simone Weil), is the only real surprise.

She begins to walk daily, past her neighborhood, downtown, along the river and beyond. It's exploration, a kind of reconnaissance. Sometimes she sweeps the alleys behind houses, hoping to get a glimpse of who lives there. Corner lot grocers and bartenders are of some help. A parking lot attendant seems to know everyone. A small thing, she creates beautiful ribboned boxes filled with green tissue paper and gifts—pistachios and coffee, racetrack tickets and cologne, tobacco and licorice, a brand-new sports watch or hairclips—which she leaves on doorsteps throughout the city. On dismal mornings the old men, pissed-off mothers, painfully shy or foul-mouthed children open their doors to an unexpected lift, each box carefully tailored to their desires. They scan the sidewalks up and down, mystified.

Back home, a fire sparks in her brain, and for a while she feels illicitly high. What is this drug, and why isn't everyone doing it?

Be There No Human Here

 

Anthropomorphism is a way to comprehend the stars, seasons, weather, animals, any kind of nonhuman behavior. It's an ancient storytelling tool that makes life more familiar, its many dangers and losses orderly, simplified. The stars, for example—explosions of hydrogen and helium. Observing them, we have nailed down eighty-eight constellations with names like Cancer (the crab) or Orion (the hunter). Once upon a time, thunder had a human face (Jove), as did spring (Persephone). Gods on Mount Olympus were mired in human rage, jealousy, and greed. As long as we have been thinking creatures, stumbling across the earth on two legs, we've assumed human qualities could be attached to anything.

Up in the sky a pair of hawks brush the high point of my vision, imperceptibly lifting the hairs from my scalp. I lean, and lean my head back. A certain privacy surrounds them: two black accents in a field of blue, two eye motes. They follow not road signs and easements but invisible pipes, cones, funnels of wind.

To see as they see—pasture cut by road, beeches sorted from the river, weeds twitching, and then, a camouflaged mole in hyperdetail, as if under a magnifying glass. The rest of the landscape is suddenly blurred, irrelevant. To aim with just one thing in mind, even if it is, comparatively, a small mind.

And yet, how I love the gray-and-blue-tinged basin of air between us. It is like standing at the edge of a continent, a kind of reprimand:
You can't have everything. The world will always be greater than your desires
.

Birds have hollow bones adapted for flight, and mammals have solid ones. I use my teeth to grind up carrots and nine-grain crackers; the chicken has a gizzard that macerates its feed. My neck seizes after ten sit-ups, and birds have extremely long and flexible cervical spines, with eleven to twenty-five cervical vertebrae instead of the average seven in mammals. See how they turn their heads and preen almost any part of their body. I tried sleeping on a train, my head leaning on the chilled, quivering window. With each gentle sway, I drifted; with each jolt, I woke. Birds have a locking mechanism that allows them to sleep with their feet perched and stable. In winter, everyone notices how pale I am, febrile, weeping from my eyes, mouth, nose, ears. A bird disguises illness as long as possible in order to avoid attack by predators. This is called “prey species defense status.” For us, it could be fatal, this insistence on the appearance of health when we are failing.

Humans are the only species that can imagine a hawk's point of view, the only animals aware of our mortality. We watch a mole scamper across the field, or a grackle born with one wing, or a mallard coated with oil, and know they too are doomed. Our language is complex and varied; we invent phrases: “A byrde yn honde ys better than three yn the wode” (circa 1530) and “When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying” (Ernest Hemingway). We study, sort, place a bird in context: Kingdom:
Animalia
; Phylum:
Chordata
; Class:
Aves
;
Order:
Falconiformes
; Family:
Accipitridae
; Genus:
Buteo
; Species:
Buteo jamaicensis
. A higher degree of intelligence also allows us to build fires, cook food, clothe ourselves, as well as exchange ideas, appreciate beauty, music, art, and literature. We dream up causes for bird behavior, which doesn't mean we get it right. Pliny the Elder, for example, thought the cuckoo was just another form of the hawk, “which at a certain season of the year changes its shape; it being the fact that during this period no other hawks are to be seen, except, perhaps, for a few days only” (
Natural History
).

Out of range, a white-tailed kite swoops low over a pasture. At first we don't recognize it. How long does the bird remain an enigma? How long is our sight confused, our mind flummoxed before the imagination, and how long before a willful desire to name rushes in?

An otherwise clever man once explained to me how hummingbirds migrate to Central America: They ride the backs of geese, he said. Diminutive, fragile, light enough to be knocked out of the sky by a snowflake. Their ultrahigh metabolism requires them to eat constantly. How else would they fly such extraordinary distances? This I believed, until I couldn't. A hummingbird would freeze if it had to wait around for geese to begin their migration, right? Also, geese winter in the southern United States, so the hummers would have to dismount and transfer to another species for the rest of the journey. No one has ever observed geese whip their heads around like dogs scratching for fleas, for wouldn't they sense the hummingbirds on their backs? Finally, could a goose locate a rest stop with nutrition for both species? These are the facts as we now know them: Hummingbirds migrate long distances.
Selasphorus rufus
breeds as far north as Alaska and winters in Central America, a distance of 2,700 miles. Studies have found that a male ruby-throated hummingbird, weighing about 4.5 g, of which 2 g was fat, could fly nonstop for 26 hours, consuming the fat at the rate of 0.69 calories per hour (R. C. Lasiewski, 1962).

Hummingbirds are efficient creatures; they avoid flocks, fly alone. But piggyback migration is a cozy tale and we love unlikely partnerships—think Laurel and Hardy. Thus the story persists, generation to generation.

Indeed, anthropomorphism begins in very early infancy: babies stare longer at objects that move purposefully. Later, the little tykes name their pets Sam or Molly. In school, their primary readers brim with talking cheetahs, pigs, and wolves. Not long before we see our faces on everything—a car with eyebrows, a tree with arms extending, a talking, walking robot.

Next comes the desire to control, to hold, to possess. A baby starling falls from the nest, and though it is not necessarily advisable (as it is well known, there are too many starlings—the result of one man's sentimental desire to return to England), we place “Betsy” in a towel-lined shoebox. The bird's beak is lined with yellow (like a shiny raincoat, we think). An eyedropper filled with cow's milk barely fits inside its mouth. Within hours, Betsy loses interest and dies. A bird angel arrives to take her to heaven.