5.

The first explicit articulation of the modern notion of progress is generally agreed to have appeared in a speech delivered in 1750 by the brilliant political economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, then just twenty-three. It is surely no coincidence that an early evangelist of economic liberty—“All branches of commerce ought to be free, equally free, and entirely free,” he wrote in 1773—would also be the first to lay out the ideology that would everywhere accompany the spread of capitalism, this mystic doctrine that envisions history traveling on a one-way path toward some as yet unimaginable perfection.

Turgot, who would go on to serve as finance minister under Louis XVI, would have an opportunity to test his economic theories if not his conviction that mankind was destined to shed its every flaw. In 1774, acting as the controller general of finances, he issued an edict abolishing all restrictions regulating the trade of grain in France. The next year’s harvest was poor. Merchants, freed from laws that had proscribed stockpiling, hoarded wheat to drive up prices. Famine ensued. Riots broke out. In what would in retrospect be seen as a prelude to the French Revolution, crowds, many of them led by women, forced landowners and merchants to sell their grain at prices they deemed reasonable. The Flour War, as it would be known, ended with a fierce repression. The government called in twenty-five thousand troops. Within a year, court intrigues would lead to Turgot’s dismissal. His reforms were soon reversed. Perhaps he was lucky. Turgot died a private man, of gout, twelve years before the monarch met the guillotine.

At the very beginning of the lecture in question, “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind,” Turgot made a surprising move. He had no sooner distinguished the sort of time that governs humanity from that which governs nature—the latter following the timeless and cyclical rule of death and regeneration while human events succeed one another in a linear and “ever-changing spectacle” as the species lurches from “infancy” to “greater perfection”—than he evoked the specter of “the Americans.” This comes on the second page. He was not thinking of the well-armed citizens of the current American polity, but of the original inhabitants of the hemisphere, whose presence posed something of a problem. If history was to be narrated as the story of the growing perfection of mankind, how to explain all those who seemed to lag behind, the tribes of so-called primitives scattered across the jungles, plains, and desert wastes? (Adam Smith, Turgot’s contemporary and fellow preacher of economic liberty, made an analogous move in the earliest paragraphs of The Wealth of Nations, in which he evoked “the savage nations of hunters and fishers,” accusing them of infanticide and comparing them unfavorably with “civilised and thriving nations.”)

We might think that progress is a theory of history, and hence of time, but very nearly the first thing Turgot did was transpose time onto space by summoning the Americas as the place of the past. He explained the apparently uneven development of humankind and the anachronistic existence of the people he regarded as savages as a result of naturally occurring inequalities: “Nature, distributing her gifts unequally, has given to certain minds an abundance of talent which she has refused to others.” Differing environmental circumstances allowed those original talents to develop at different rates, “and it is from the infinite variety of circumstances that there springs the inequality in the progress of nations.”

Before it was anything else, the doctrine of progress was a theory of white supremacy. Better put, since strictly racial theories would not arise for another few decades, it was a cocksure expression of what even then was a highly parochial and amnesiac variety of chauvinism, a way of celebrating European dominance by anchoring it in time, and rendering Europe, and specifically Bourbon France, the very apotheosis of human achievement. In a parallel move three-quarters of a century later, Hegel would claim that same honor for the Prussian monarchy. One and a half centuries after that, just as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was sliding past 350 ppm, such lights as Francis Fukuyama would do the same for capitalism under American liberal democracy. As an ideology of overconfident elites, progress would prove itself remarkably resilient.

It’s worth recalling that the first Europeans to lay eyes on the great cities of the Americas did not see them as Turgot did. Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, wrote to King Charles V that the Inca capital of Cuzco, which Pizarro plundered and largely destroyed, “is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be remarkable even in Spain.” Cortés apologized to the same monarch that he did not have the literary skills to adequately describe the marvels of Tenochtitlán, with its temples and wide causeways rising from the waters of Lake Texcoco, its fragrant gardens, great public squares, markets filled with riches: “I am fully aware that this account will appear so wonderful as to be deemed scarcely worthy of credit; since even when we who have seen these things with our own eyes are yet so amazed as to be unable to comprehend their reality.” Cortés’s soldiers, his lieutenant Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote, “had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome,” but they had never seen anything so wondrous as the Aztec city. “I stood looking at it, and thought that no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world,” Díaz wrote. “But today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”

Just last week I read in the papers about the discovery of the remains of villages, roads, and fortified settlements long concealed by foliage in the Amazon, traces left by as many as a million people who had all disappeared at about the same time—roughly when Europeans arrived on the continent. “Diseases travel much faster than people,” the lead archaeologist told The Guardian. The Amazon’s inhabitants may have been wiped out before the Portuguese ever reached the area.

It’s a good trick, really, so seamlessly clever that Turgot and many millions since didn’t see it as a trick at all: allow biological agents to help you conquer half the world, slaughter and enslave whomever the microbes let live, declare the hobbled remnants of the civilizations you have destroyed primitive and savage and interpret the degraded manner in which many of your victims are forced to survive as evidence of your inherent superiority, your right to rule over them and to continue to exploit them under cover of civilizing motives. Progress, it’s called.

Turgot went on to sketch out a narrative that should by now be quite familiar: the mantle of civilization passed from the once-great civilizations of Egypt, India, and China, all strangled by their own despotism, and onward, via the Phoenicians—in themselves mere “agents of exchanges between peoples”—to Greece and then Rome, until the latter empire, a victim of its own descent into tyranny, “at last suddenly collapses” under the attacks of opportunistic hordes. The rise of Islam merited brief condemnation, almost parenthetically, as “a raging torrent which ravages the whole territory from the Indian frontiers to the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees.” The glories of Baghdad and al-Andalus were passed over without comment, though Turgot acknowledged that Islamic scholars did Europe the service of transmitting Europe’s past to its future by disseminating “the feeble sparks” of Greek wisdom that they had managed to preserve. That was all it took. “The treasures of antiquity, rescued from the dust . . . summon[ed] genius from the depths of its retreats. The time has come,” Turgot enthused. “Issue forth, Europe, from the darkness which covered thee!”

Messianic thinking, that child of disaster and offspring of the oppressed, takes on here, in the hands of the triumphant, a strange, tumescent form. Expectation is still its guiding passion. Paradise awaits, but it now belongs to human—read European—reason, unaided by the divine. Knowledge builds upon its own accomplishment. Scientific and technological discoveries pile one atop the other. “The scaffolding rises with the building,” Turgot wrote. Time is not a scar, but a boast, and a promise. “Time,” urged Turgot, rhapsodic, “spread your swift wings!”

His discourse concludes with a paean to the king, not the one Turgot would later serve and who would still later lose his head in the Place de la Concorde, but his predecessor, also named Louis, who died in his own bed in the palace at Versailles, of smallpox—the same virus that helped reduce the population of the Americas by as much as 95 percent. “O Louis, what majesty surrounds thee!” Turgot crooned. “Century of Louis the Great, may your light beautify the precious reign of his successor! May it last for ever, may it extend over the world!”

All those deaths—the 95 percent of the hemispheric population that did not survive the earliest encounters with the “greater perfection” of Europe—may have actually altered the climate. Other scientists blame sunspots or volcanic eruptions, but so goes one of the current theories explaining the advent of the so-called Little Ice Age, the brief episode of global cooling that peaked between about 1550 and 1750. The rapid depopulation of the Americas meant that large-scale agriculture all but ceased throughout the hemisphere. No one was left to burn woods and grasslands to clear stumps and brush for farming, or at least not on the scale that they had been a few years earlier. The land recovers swiftly without us: More than a hundred million acres of once-cultivated land grew back as forest and savanna—the Edenic, apparently virgin woods and plains that European settlers found spread out before them like a dream. Which meant billions of new trees, grasses, vines, and shrubs sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: by one estimate, the post-conquest reforestation of the Americas sequestered between five and ten trillion metric tons of carbon, causing global CO₂ levels to fall by 2 percent and temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere to tumble.

Beginning in about 1570, Europe endured a series of deadly winters followed by cool summers in which the sun barely shined. Grain harvests failed. Between 1630 and 1710, France suffered five dreadful famines, one of them stretching over three years. The feudal system, which depended on the production of an annual surplus of grain that peasants would pay as a tributary tax to landed nobles, began to unravel. So did the ideologies it had spawned, and on which it rested. By one account, 1,265 food riots tore at France between 1661 and 1789. There was one in 1752, two years after Turgot rhapsodized his way through his “Philosophical Review,” just as the Little Ice Age was lifting and the climate, for a little while anyway, was stabilizing once more.

It’s windy today. Two plastic bottles, an empty snack-sized bag of Doritos, and a paper burger wrapper have joined the dog shit and the yellowed bamboo leaves on my backyard square of Astroturf, gifts blown in from the lots and the alleys. I left town for two days and came back to find the weather warmer. Before I left it had been dropping almost to freezing each night. Everyone I talked to was complaining. In Europe it had been colder still. Snow fell as far south as Rome. In England, temperatures hit record-breaking lows. The British army had been called out to ferry health workers over frozen roads. All of this, apparently, because melting sea ice and lack of snow cover in Siberia had caused a high-pressure front to drift north. The polar vortex, which normally traps cold air over the Arctic, had collapsed, allowing the low pressure and cold air to drop south over Europe and the American West. Temperatures in the Arctic, meanwhile, are fifty degrees higher than they usually are. It’s still winter, and it’s above freezing at the North Pole.

It is now such a reflex to consider past civilizations stupid and superstitious—or stupider, at least, than we are—that it is hard to imagine the relief that men of Turgot’s era must have felt on unburdening themselves of the past, launching themselves into a limitless future. Previous generations of human beings in nearly every corner of the planet had regarded their ancestors with veneration, and what a drag it must have been to have to lug those old farts and all their dumb ideas everywhere, and always with a smile. Turgot’s ecstasy broke through in his punctuation, and in the impatience of his syntax: “What ridiculous opinions marked our first steps! How absurd were the causes which our fathers thought up to make sense of what they saw! What sad monuments they are to the weakness of the human mind!”

The first thing he hastened to toss over was the notion that all things are alive and infused with divinity. This, by his reckoning, was one of “those delusive analogies to which the first men in their immaturity abandoned themselves with so little thought.” Like children, Turgot explained, they imagined that all the things they perceived that “were independent of their own actions were produced by beings similar to them, but invisible and more powerful.” Thus, they supposed, superstitiously, “all objects of nature had their gods.” Against this, he allied himself, if only half-heartedly, to a sterile monotheism, nodding to the Christian deity later in the lecture, but only in passing, and without a shred of the enthusiasm that he brought to subjects such as Reason, Europe, and France. But the task of denuding the natural world of agency and divinity was apparently an important one, and could not be neglected. For the grand procession of progress to march, the stage had to first be cleared of rivals. All the world must be dead, and man alone alive, rushing to the glory of his fate.

On the morning of July 6, 1962, the United States Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 104-kiloton thermonuclear bomb 635 feet beneath the ground at Yucca Flat, Nevada, about one hundred miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip. The test, one of hundreds conducted there, was code-named Sedan. It was part of Operation Plowshare, a project meant to explore, in the words of its architect, the physicist Edward Teller, the possibilities for “constructive, peaceful uses of nuclear explosives,” namely moving massive amounts of earth more quickly and cheaply than conventional methods would allow. “We needn’t take a coastline as it happens to be,” enthused Teller at the time. The AEC drew up plans to excavate new harbors for oil tankers in Alaska, to blast a canal across the width of Nicaragua, and to use twenty-three bombs to slice a trench through the Mojave’s Bristol Mountains so the railroads and Interstate 40 wouldn’t have to loop around them. Nuclear explosions might even one day be used to influence the weather, Teller wrote in an article published two years before the Sedan test. “We’re Going to Work Miracles,” it was titled. It is a dizzying creed, progress.

Three seconds after the Sedan detonation, a dome of loose earth more than six hundred feet in diameter rose three hundred feet in the air. A bright light flashed across the sky. The cloud kept climbing, rising to twelve thousand feet above the Nevada desert and splitting into two enormous plumes of radioactive dust and ash that drifted north and east, dropping fallout as they went, until they finally passed over the Atlantic Ocean somewhere between North Carolina and Delaware. Some of the highest concentrations, as luck or fate would have it, landed in Washabaugh County, South Dakota, which at the time was almost entirely within the boundaries of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Indian Reservations—home to, among others, the Miniconjou and Oglala Lakota Sioux.

Even the desert can start to feel small. Edward Teller was born in Budapest under the name Ede, which he changed before emigrating to the United States in 1935, just a few years after his cousin György Dobó changed his name to George Devereux and began doing fieldwork with the Mohave, along the Colorado River, about 275 miles to the south of the desert testing grounds that Teller would so assiduously bomb.

I drove yesterday to the Valley of Fire, a state park about an hour northeast of the city. It was a long week, and a strange one. The Rhino proposed arming schoolteachers. This is how policy seems to work these days: an idea so outlandishly stupid that it is initially floated in the press only as a laugh line—Rambo teachers, a literal wall on the Mexican border—gains traction on right-wing media, crosses over to mainstream outlets, and is eventually accepted as, if not an inevitability, an unmovable part of the discourse. But by the end of the week enough momentum for gun control was building—thanks to the courage and outrage of the teenaged Parkland survivors—that even the Rhino was considering token measures. Wayne LaPierre, the reptilian chief of the National Rifle Association, announced that gun ownership is a right “granted by God.” A church in Pennsylvania—the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, it is called—asked parishioners to bring their assault rifles to services so that they could be blessed, like puppies and hamsters on the feast of St. Francis. Photographs later emerged of the rite. The worshippers wore brass crowns of bullets. In Syria too, shells circled civilians’ heads: the Assad regime was bombing East Ghouta, just outside Damascus, killing hundreds. And the Rhino, in a news conference with the Australian prime minister, gloated over a new set of sanctions against North Korea. If that didn’t do the trick, he warned, “we’ll have to go to Phase Two. Phase Two may be a very rough thing. Maybe very, very unfortunate for the world.”

I got off the interstate at the edge of the Moapa Paiute reservation and drove another fifteen miles east into the park. The rocks were a craggy, lumpy sandstone, a shocking red in color, as if they’d been dripped onto the mottled floor of the desert from some enormous paintbrush. I found a trail, hiked in a few miles, ate lunch with my feet dangling over the edge of a boulder, and napped beneath a steep escarpment of red stone. The silence did me good. And the folds and hollows in the rock, the wind rushing through the stern, determined chaos of the landscape. Two ravens flew by, cawing to each other in flight. An owl hooted somewhere out of sight. I walked not fifty feet past a bighorn sheep munching at the shrubs along the edge of a wash. We stared at each other for a minute or two before he went back to his meal.

I made it to the car a few minutes before sunset, when the park closed, but I had time to check out the petroglyphs just off the main road. They were carved into a flat, vertical plane of rock perhaps sixty-five feet up from the desert floor. Park authorities had built a metal staircase so that visitors could see them from the comfort of a viewing platform that was likely designed to discourage vandalism but that had not stopped Johnny, Doreen, and Hermann, among others, from scratching their names alongside the ancient glyphs. They were better preserved than the ones I had seen in Sloan Canyon, and seemed more purposefully arrayed: circles within circles, a cross, bighorn sheep, what looked like drooping Joshua trees, suns, and squiggly lines. The usual official signage explained that they once meant something but we don’t know what it was, and please don’t destroy them.

I had been thinking about writing all afternoon, what it is for, and whom, wondering why—if I find it hard to believe it will make a difference to this sinking world—I still do it, scratching away at the keyboard, as if someone, one day, would weld a staircase and viewing platform beneath my screen and carve their own names beside these by-then indecipherable runes. I can’t say I came up with much. (From George MacDonald’s Lilith: “I do not know about world. What is it? What more but a word in your beautiful, big mouth?”) It was dark when I headed down the long, straight road to the interstate again. I kept seeing bursts of light in the distance ahead of me, six or eight miles off, sudden blossoms of white or red or green that hung in the air for a few seconds before falling and fading to black. Fireworks. I was too far off to hear them. I wondered if there was a party in town, a quinceañera or a wedding, but when I got closer I remembered that there was no town, and nothing for miles, just a brightly lit truck stop at the southern boundary of the Moapa reservation. I pulled into the lot beside the gas station and parked among the semis idling there. I didn’t see a party, or anything, really, just a few kids in a wide, bulldozed field of dirt, shooting fireworks high into the sky and, occasionally, at each other.

The other great early exponent of progress was Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, better known as the Marquis de Condorcet. A friend of Turgot, and later his biographer, Condorcet became an ardent republican and after the Revolution served as secretary of the Legislative Assembly until that body was dissolved, and the king dethroned, in 1792. In those days, surely, the world must have felt like it was ending, or beginning again. Condorcet welcomed its rebirth. He was at odds, though, with the Revolution’s most radical factions, and was sharply critical of the constitution drafted in June of 1793 by Robespierre and Saint-Just. In July a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Condorcet would spend the next nine months in hiding, cooped up in a house on a small street just north of the Luxembourg Gardens. Three months into his confinement, he would be condemned to death in absentia. The Terror had begun. Despite these pressures, Condorcet continued to work on the text for which he would be best known, a book-length treatise of astonishing optimism entitled Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. “The perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite,” he wrote in the introduction, and “the progress of this perfectibility . . . has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.”

He would not live to see the work published. Early in April of 1794, informed that his capture was imminent, Condorcet fled Paris. Two days later, bleeding from a wound on his leg, dirty and bedraggled from sleeping in the open, he walked into a wine shop in a village just outside the city. He ordered an omelet. When the proprietor asked how many eggs he wanted, Condorcet, who had presumably not eaten for days, aroused the suspicion of his host by answering, “A dozen”: only an aristocrat would presume to order an omelet of a dozen eggs. He was dragged to the prison in the commune of Bourg-la-Reine, which at the time was known as Bourg-l’Égalité, or, roughly, Equality-ville. Accounts vary, but either the following morning or the one after that, the Marquis de Condorcet was found dead on the floor of his cell.

While still in hiding in Paris, at work on the Outlines, confined to the rooms of the small house on Rue Servandoni, his country at war against most of Europe, hearing frequent news of the beheadings of friends and colleagues, Condorcet surely must have suspected that his own death, and not a pleasant one, was likely near. He nonetheless remained convinced, with a fervor that can only be described as ecstatic, that there was no other path for humankind than that of ever-increasing perfection. The final chapter of the text was devoted to forecasting the outlines of that bright future. Everyone on the planet, he predicted, would “one day arrive at the state of civilization attained by those people who are most enlightened, most free, . . . as the French, for instance, and the Anglo-Americans.” This would mean an end to “the slavery of countries subjected to kings, the barbarity of African tribes, and the ignorance of savages.”

Condorcet was a brave man, and every bit the liberal hero: he had only the most passionate and eloquent words of condemnation for slavery, the oppression of women, and the brutal exploitation of colonized peoples, but his certitude rested on a deep and unquestioned conviction in the moral superiority of Europe, despite all the dizzying evidence to the contrary. Slavery and the various cruelties that Europe had visited on the people of Africa and Asia would soon surely end, he believed, “and we shall become to them instruments of benefit, and the generous champions of their redemption from bondage.” It’s quite a fantasy: the dog, having been whipped to a degree that even the master must acknowledge as excessive, will, with a few encouraging pats on the hindquarters, lick his master’s magnanimous hands.

Progress, once again, was before all else a doctrine of supremacy, a fresh new faith for a rising era of unchallenged European dominance. It extended through time the inequities of power that had only in the previous two centuries taken shape across the globe, spreading the same cruel hierarchy across all of time and space. It was Europe that held exclusive title to reason and to peace—this despite the conflicts that had wracked the continent over the preceding hundred years: a seven-year war that had killed nearly a million just three decades earlier, the wars over the Austrian and Spanish successions that between them killed another million and a half, and the war that the Revolution itself had sparked, which by 1815 would have taken another five million lives. Nonetheless it was Europe that had lit the way and Europe that would cut through all remaining darkness, Europe that would lead the scattered people of the earth to a future without war or oppression or discrimination based on sex or tribal prejudice. Sanitation would improve, and nutrition, and medicine. Human lifespans would grow longer. One universal language would spread across the earth “and render error almost impossible.” Except for the language bit—English functions well enough—this is still the faith that fuels contemporary neoliberalism and the logic of “development”: The global extension of European ways, meaning open markets and liberal institutions, will spur technological improvements and improve the lot of all, indefinitely. One day the natives will thank us. It is a powerful and alluring vision. For some, at least. Little wonder that Condorcet clung to it even as the world he knew was being washed away with blood.

Condorcet took one notable step that his friend Turgot did not. In his introduction, he devotes more praise to one advance than any other: the invention of writing. Specifically, of alphabetical writing. After quickly sketching the leap from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture and the birth of property, he conjectured, as Turgot had before him, that the resulting social inequalities produced a class that was not compelled by necessity to work, and was hence at liberty to observe, experiment, and invent. (In their abundant leisure, the rich have rarely found time to notice the inventiveness of those whose labor makes their comforts possible.) As their societies grew more complex, the members of this class “felt the necessity of having a mode of communicating their ideas to the absent.” In response to this pressing need, some brilliant soul or souls began to write.

It was at first a crude affair, pictorial symbols that represented the objects for which they stood by a process akin to metaphor. For Condorcet, the real and decisive innovation, the one invented by “men of genius, the eternal benefactors of the human race,” was alphabetic writing. He did not likely know of Maya glyphs or Mojave petroglyphs and would not have thought much of them, but this distinction allowed him to relegate the Chinese and the Egyptians to the backward realm of metaphor, and to elevate the Greeks and all those who followed them into the paradise of phonetic abstraction. Such thinking was not new: as early as the sixteenth century, the Jesuit José de Acosta, who had spent seventeen years in Mexico and Peru and was familiar with both the Maya codices and the quipu of the Inca, made a distinction between written signs that referred to words and pictorial signs that referred directly to things. The latter, he wrote, “are not called, nor are they in reality true letters, even though they are written, just as one cannot say that a painted image of the sun is writing.” It goes without saying, Acosta continued, that “no nation of Indians that has been discovered in our times uses either letters or writing.”

Astronomy was nice and agriculture convenient, but no other human accomplishment mattered more. Writing was the thing. It was the key to the map sketched out by the long, forward march of progress. “It is between this degree of civilization and that in which we still find the savage tribes,” wrote Condorcet, “that we must place every people whose history has been handed down to us . . . an unbroken chain of connection between the earliest periods of history and the age in which we live, between the first people known to us, and the present nations of Europe.”

Ha! Kim Jong-un invited the Rhino to Pyongyang for talks and the Rhino said yes.

Condorcet was surely not aware of it, but it was in April 1784, ten years to the month before his death, that James Watt patented the double-acting steam engine that would within a few decades spread throughout Great Britain, over the Channel to the Netherlands, France, and Russia, and across the Atlantic to the United States. By the close of the next century, the world would run on coal. Human beings, frail and featherless, had proven ourselves something more than clever predators. We could make the skies darken at noon, and brighten the night, and shift the very winds and the currents of the seas. Who else but man could melt a glacier? Who else but man could burn it all? Condorcet was right: Europe indeed had lit the way.

I went away for the weekend to visit family. Leaving Vegas makes me happy and seeing them makes me happier still, but it means that I don’t write. If I let too much time pass without writing, I start to fray. I get depressed, a bit crazy. It all piles up so quickly, and this is the only way I know how to sort through it, to cut it down. So though I miss them, I am happy to be here. Here meaning this place, on this page, in these words. Not Las Vegas, where I also am.

I came across a rare bit of local public art this morning, an equestrian monument cast in bronze. It stood outside the parking lot of a community center in a district of low warehouses behind razor-wire fencing. Letters carved into a stone in front of the statue identified it as a gift of the Rio Hotel & Casino. The rider was Rafael Rivera, “discoverer of the Las Vegas valley,” a distinction the Paiute and Chemehuevi would likely dispute. Rivera was a scout for a trading party headed for Los Angeles in 1829. This was still Mexico then. Rivera was sent off to find water, and he did. He wandered for more than a week before he found this valley. The springs had not run dry yet. It was green here then, lush enough that they called it “the meadows,” which is the name it still bears. The sculptor gave Rivera Anglo features and a dull, gormless expression, as if he could not understand what he was seeing.

Early in the morning, it’s easier to remember that this is desert. The doves and pigeons are just waking. I try to concentrate on them as I run, to focus on the way pigeons go motionless as they approach the ground, their tail feathers spread, wings behind them in a taut, frozen V. I ran east toward the sun rising behind the mountains, the sky still pinker than it was blue. I tried to squint away the buildings and the streets. It didn’t work. This morning the Rhino fired his secretary of state, whose fate has been sealed since October, when he called the Rhino a “fucking moron.” The court dramas have been nonstop all week, news breaking every day about fresh departures from the White House and the latest from Stormy Daniels, the porn star with whom the Rhino had a brief affair in 2006. Vladimir Putin, in an interview with NBC news, denied that Russia had interfered with the 2016 U.S. election and suggested that perhaps it was the Ukrainians, or the Jews. The Rhino has not voiced a word of complaint. He’ll replace the outgoing secretary of state with the current CIA chief, who is much keener on punishing Iran, and less given to contradicting his boss. The CIA chief will be replaced with his deputy, who directly oversaw the torture of CIA prisoners at a secret site in Thailand. Rumor has it that the Rhino plans to replace his national security advisor, who is regarded by D.C. insiders as one of the few brakes on the Rhino’s most recklessly bellicose moods, with a famously abrasive and immoderately mustachioed neoconservative who has made a career of reckless bellicosity.

I ran home on Sunrise Avenue, past block after block of stained stucco apartments, about a third of them boarded up, street numbers painted with black stencils on the walls. I turned up Fremont Street, named for the first Anglo-American to pass through the Las Vegas valley. Fremont is the main drag downtown, home now to many fine abandoned motels. There are counties in four states named for him too, and at least a dozen towns, three mountains, and a river. Rafael Rivera got the park behind the community center, plus the service road that runs alongside the 215 freeway.

(To be fair, being white and stumbling through a valley that already bore the name “Las Vegas” was not John C. Frémont’s only claim to fame. In April 1846, his band slaughtered somewhere between 120 and 1,000—they did not count, and the recollections of Frémont’s men varied widely—men, women, and children, probably of the Wintu tribe, on the banks of the Sacramento River near what is now Redding, California. Ten years later he would become the Republican Party’s first candidate for president.)

I scared up a gathering of mockingbirds in the corner of an empty lot. David Byrne sang through my earbuds, “Time isn’t holding up / Time isn’t after us.” A few blocks down, I was surprised to spot an osprey flapping slowly above me in the sky, a fish hawk far from any body of water larger than the fountains in front of the casinos, far even from Lake Mead and the detergent-scented eddies of treated wastewater that flow through the Las Vegas Wash. The pigeons scattered beneath it, panicking as the larger bird flew past.

In October 1793, the same month that Condorcet was condemned to death, France’s National Convention, which had replaced the Legislative Assembly one year before, voted to adopt a new calendar. I’ve seen a copy of it, or a photo of one, the paper brown with age, frayed and dog-eared, the words “Calendrier Républicain” printed in black ink on the cover, and beneath them, in smaller type, and in French, “Decreed by the National Convention, for the IInd year of the French Republic.” The year before, the Convention had begun counting the years anew, dating them to the birth of the Republic rather than the birth of Christ. Time had zeroed out and started again.

How giddy they must have felt, how brave and how light. Everything was new, or would be soon. The cobwebs of the old regime and the centuries of priestly superstition on which it rested would all be swept away. The Republican calendar, designed by a committee of politicians, scientists, mathematicians, and a writer, would be clean and exact, suitable to the age of reason that the Revolution had ushered in. Its predecessor, one committee member (the writer) complained, “exhibited neither utility nor method; it was a collection of lies, of deceit or of charlatanism.” The new one would do away with all that, scrapping the jumbled saints’ days and festivities and all the religious holdovers of the Gregorian calendar, stripping time of the accumulated prejudices of antiquity. It’s a curious notion, really, that time should not be tainted by the past.

The Republican calendar would divide the year into twelve months, each one composed of three ten-day weeks, plus a week of either five or six “complementary days” to keep the calendar in synch with the sun. Acknowledging the twelve yearly orbits of the moon around the earth would be the committee’s only accommodation to the solar system’s disregard for decimals: each day would be subdivided into ten hours, every hour into one hundred minutes, the minutes into one hundred seconds each. The pagan origins of the names of the months—janvier for the Roman god Janus, février for the ancient Roman purification festival fevrua, mars for the god of war—would be replaced with neologisms drawn from French, Latin, and Greek describing climactic conditions around Paris at the appropriate time of year, i.e., Brumaire, or “misty” in the fall; Nivôse, or “snowy” in midwinter; Floréal to coincide with spring’s first blooms. The days of the week would be similarly cleansed in favor of austere, ordinal numbers: primidi, duodi, tridi, etc. Realizing that the peasantry might miss the festive wheel of saints’ days—and the revelries that went with them—the committee devised a separate rural calendar, naming every day of the year after “useful products of the soil, the tools that we use to cultivate it, and the domesticated animals, our faithful servants in these works.” In this abundance of whimsy, 2 Frimaire was named for turnips, 8 Nivôse for manure, 15 Vendémiaire for donkeys, and 10 Thermidor for the watering can.

For all its semi-comic joylessness and kitsch, it might be easy to miss that this rationalization also functioned as an ethnic cleansing of traditional timekeeping, which for centuries had acted as a depository of disparate and forgotten forms. The days might be named for Roman gods, but there were seven of them because the Babylonians deemed that number significant, presumably because seven easily visible heavenly bodies circle along the ecliptic: the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. The days are divided as they are because the Egyptians used a duodecimal arithmetic, splitting the night into twelve roughly equal periods, each marked by the rising of a different star. We divvy hours and minutes into sixty pieces each because the Babylonians and Sumerians employed a sexagesimal mathematics. There is nothing more rational about the number ten except that the Greeks and Romans based their arithmetic upon it, and they were the elected paragons of reason. It is difficult to imagine any logical advantage for the use of Roman rather than Arabic numerals to mark the years, as the designers of the new calendar preferred, except to retroactively cement this alliance with the Empire of Reason.

I am not suggesting that this was an intentional or even conscious goal on the part of the calendar’s designers. The association of parochially European habits with the universality of reason did not have to be conscious to be effective. It has historically been so effective precisely because it remains an unconscious constituent of an entire system of thought. And of power. Fabre d’Églantine, the committee’s resident poet and playwright, who was largely responsible for naming the days of the rural calendar, did not likely pause to consider that there is nothing universal about the weather in Paris. He had only to open a window or walk in a park. But even if you call the month Frimaire, it will not be frosty in Cayenne in December, and horse chestnuts, honored on 23 Germinal, will not thrive in any month in Martinique.

In the end the calendar died with the Republic. Napoleon officially tossed it aside one year after his coronation. The days would march past as they had before the Revolution. Or at least with the same old names. From almost the beginning, though, it had been evident that the new calendar did not function very well. It is safe to say that no one who lived off their labor preferred a ten-day wait for the weekend over the old sabbath every seventh day, and that the peasantry found 8 Nivôse, the Day of Manure, and 30 Prairial, the Day of the Hand Cart, to be insulting and inadequate surrogates for the days of rest and feasting that they replaced.

Even on a theoretical level, the calendar was flawed. The committee had introduced a contradiction into its design that rendered it more confusing, and less functional, than many calendars devised by “primitive” astronomers. The years, according to the committee’s decree, would start on the autumn equinox. A leap day would be added as a sixth “complementary day” every fourth year. But the autumnal equinox does not reliably coincide with the first day of the year every four years. To remedy this, they could either embrace nature or abstract reason, but not both. They could pin the calendar on an astronomical event, the equinox, and have the leap year vary, or they could impose an artificial regularity and abandon the calendar’s anchor to the rhythms of the heavens.

Charles-Gilbert Romme, the head of the committee, suggested the latter tactic, borrowing the Gregorian calendar’s method of adding an additional day to years divisible by four (unless they happened to be divisible by one hundred but not by four hundred). His solution was inelegant, and tainted by association, but it did have the virtue of working. It wouldn’t matter. Romme’s proposal was never adopted. He was arrested in the spring of 1795, year III. That June 17, or 29 Prairial, he stabbed himself to death before he could be led to the guillotine, which had taken the head of his colleague, the poet and playwright Fabre d’Églantine, the previous 16 Germinal. It was Lettuce Day, by his own pen.

I read in the paper this morning, or on my phone, really, that rising sea levels are threatening the mysterious sculpted heads on Easter Island. Already the beaches there are washing away. The waves are revealing old tombs, exposing ancient bones. The cliffs are eroding. If they go, the giant heads, remnants of a civilization that has long since collapsed, will go too. The article ended on a note that I couldn’t help but find hopeful. The people of Easter Island were doing what they could to get ready, collecting data, making plans. “We have been here 1,000 years,” a local architect named Hetereki Huke told the reporter. “Believe me,” he said, they had been through times like this before, and they knew: “The world isn’t ending.”

Civilizations come and go. Who but historians and archaeologists think about the glories of the Nanda or the Wari or the sixteen-hundred-year rule of the Chola? Most, though, do not simply vanish. People fight to stay alive, cultures too. When the Classic era of Maya civilization collapsed in about A.D. 900, its cities were abandoned, but the Maya did not disappear. They just moved, shifting to the peripheries of the old Classic era terrain: to the northern edge of the Yucatán Peninsula and south into the Guatemalan highlands. For centuries after the Spanish conquest, they continued to refuse to disappear. In 1546 the Maya of the Yucatán revolted, slaughtering their conquerors in large numbers before being slaughtered themselves. Three hundred years later they nearly drove whites and mestizos from the peninsula and created an independent Maya state that would survive until the early twentieth century. In Guatemala, Maya in the Petén region managed to keep the Spanish at bay until the late 1600s. The K’iche’ briefly won independence in an 1820 revolt. The Mexican state of Chiapas saw major indigenous rebellions in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and late twentieth centuries. I was there for the tail end of one of them.

It was late August 1995. On New Year’s Day of the previous year, the Zapatista National Liberation Army had emerged from the Lacandón Jungle, poorly armed and worse than outnumbered. The fighting was over in days, but the Zapatistas would prove agile, brilliant even, at using media and other symbolic means in lieu of actual weapons. Even the date of their rebellion, which coincided with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, was chosen for its symbolic impact. Their revolt was not just against the inequality, poverty, and repressive violence that had been suffered by indigenous communities since the arrival of Cortés, but against something called neoliberalism, of which NAFTA was only a small part.

Despite an expensive undergraduate education and voracious reading habits, that was a word I had never come across until I first encountered it in a Zapatista communiqué. It was not at that time a word we used in the United States. Even the cleverest fish rarely talk much about water. But there it was: the creed that guided my society had been named, its belief in the redemptive power of financial markets, in the distributive glory of unfettered capitalism, and in the irrelevance and even danger of any politics that sought to subject the latter to anything more than the most minor corrections. As its name implied, it was an eighteenth-century faith refurbished for the close of the twentieth, and its ubiquitous apostles spoke in a language—of progress and liberty and the triumphs of technology and instrumental reason—that their predecessors would have had little trouble understanding, a language that dominated the discourse so effectively that for a few decades they could safely insist that every other tongue spoken on the planet offered only gibberish.

I had arrived in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas a few months earlier to work on a documentary about the Zapatista uprising. The filmmakers’ finances kept falling through and the production was delayed, but I liked it there, and stuck around, sending the director occasional updates about the political situation while teaching English, studying Spanish, and befriending half the street kids who hung out in the plaza. They taught me a few words of Tzotzil, one of several local Maya languages, and laughed at my pronunciation. There wasn’t always running water in the house my then girlfriend and I shared with a stoned and generally hostile English expat, but our share of the rent came out to fifty dollars a month. Every morning when I left the house I would look down the sloping streets at the city with its red tile roofs, the green mountains rising on all sides, the sky a depth of blue that I had never seen before.

That June, the Zapatistas had put out a call for a national referendum. They were struggling then, as they would be for years to come, to turn the short-lived uprising into a national movement. The referendum was one of many attempts to sidestep a political system that they saw as irredeemably corrupt, and to forge, in the process, an authentically democratic politics of resistance. It asked five yes-or-no questions. Among them: Should the Zapatistas convert themselves from a guerrilla army into an independent political movement? Should they join other already-existing organizations? Did everyone agree on their principal demands? My girlfriend and I joined thousands of other volunteers who helped administer the poll around the country. I remember long hours in fluorescent-lit church basements, a general air of urgency and excitement from which fear was not entirely absent. Though the fighting had ended, much of the state was still under the control of the military, and the Zapatistas and their supporters were being quietly harassed, intimidated, and sometimes murdered.

Except for the shantytowns at its periphery, where the kids in the plaza lived, San Cristóbal was a Ladino town, meaning that it was white and mestizo. The racial hierarchy was strict, and energetically enforced. It was analogous to the systems in place in the Jim Crow South. During the rainy season, the streets would turn briefly into rivers, so the sidewalks were built high and narrow. Until recently, I was told more than once, Indians had been expected to yield the sidewalks to Ladinos, to descend into the mud so their superiors could walk past them without dirtying their heels.

That day in August, the sidewalks were packed. The streets too. I remember climbing onto a roof so that we could see them streaming into town by the thousands, pouring in from every village around. Some came from places far enough out that they must have walked all night to personally deliver their ballots. Many were barefoot. They were short people but even the older ones who were bent from a lifetime of work in the fields looked very tall that day.

That’s it. That’s the story. They had a message to deliver: that they were not gone or dead or irrelevant, but alive, unbowed, and unafraid. For a few hours they gathered in the plaza and in the square outside the cathedral. They handed over their ballots, and then walked home.

A foot of snow just fell on the East Coast, the fourth nor’easter in three weeks. The equinox was Tuesday, so it’s spring now, officially. You have to dig deep to find anything in the news linking this to climate change, but the science is easy to track down. Increasing evidence ties extreme winter weather in the northeastern United States to rising temperatures in the Arctic. The low-pressure zone that locks cold air over the pole is collapsing as the Arctic warms. Also, the last male northern white rhinoceros on the planet died on Monday, in Kenya. The photos were unbearable: one of his keepers crouching to embrace him as he lay on the dirt-and-straw floor of his pen, his skin hanging like a rough blanket thrown over his giant frame.

Our Rhino survives. He’s starting a trade war with China, and yesterday he went and did it, elevating a rabid, mustachioed cretin despised by more or less everyone who has ever met him to the post of national security advisor. Tune in tomorrow for another episode. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is as much as sixteen times larger than previously estimated: 617,763 square miles of swirling plastic crap, larger than the combined areas of the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

Everything changes, even time. Hegel, lecturing in 1830 at the University of Berlin, described nature as dull and essentially static, “a tedious chronicle in which the same cycle recurs again and again.” Yawn. It was in the more stimulating “theatre of world history,” he promised, that “the spirit attains its most concrete reality.” Time only started moving in a meaningful way, in other words, when humans were involved, and then only certain humans, on certain parts of the globe.

Africans, predictably, did not make the cut. Sub-Saharan Africa was, wrote Hegel in a passage that descends into breathtaking racism, “the land of childhood, removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night.” That is almost certainly the kindest thing he had to say on the subject. (He continued: “The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness . . . to comprehend him correctly, we must abstract from all reverence and morality, and from everything which we call feeling.”) Native Americans did not fare better. In Hegel’s telling they were weak and passive, “obviously unintelligent individuals with little capacity for education.” They could almost be said not to exist at all, and in any case possessed “a purely natural culture which had to perish as soon as spirit approached it.” He meant that very literally—nearly all of the hemisphere’s original inhabitants, he declared, had been “wiped out” not long after their first contact with Europeans. In 1830 this may still have been wishful thinking, but for Hegel, it was as it should be. History was not for such as they: “Culturally inferior nations . . . are gradually eroded through contact with more advanced nations.” Or not so gradually. Which left Asia, where “the light of the spirit first emerged,” before it leaped to Europe, its proper home. Hegel is worth quoting again on that count: “World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.” History had a direction in space as well as time. It belonged to Europe.

Until recently, most Europeans bore this burden lightly. Wars, famines, and plagues came and went, announcing little but more war or some fresh pestilence. Christ’s return hung like a lantern at the end of time, and though some might pray that it hurry or be certain it was nigh, time nonetheless lazed past according to the rhythms of the plough and the scythe, the wheel of the saints’ days and the opportunities for rest and carousal that accompanied them. For all but a minuscule literate elite, the years passed without number. Churches did not trouble to record the years of births, baptisms, and marriages until the sixteenth century. Common people’s lives were ruled by neither days nor hours. The church bells would ring for matins and vespers, but no further demarcation of the time was necessary or even possible. Mechanical clocks only began to appear on church towers in the fourteenth century, and then only in cities and large towns. For the next four hundred years, it would have made little sense to slice an hour into smaller bits. Most clocks did not even have minute hands. If the need arose, time could be subdivided into commonly understood and distinctly human-sized quantities—the time it takes to mow a field of grain, say, or to recite an Our Father, or to urinate. An interval known as a “pissing while” made it into Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, as in: “He had not been there—bless the mark!—a pissing while, but all the chamber smelt him.”

Over the course of the seventeenth century, more accurate clocks began to proliferate, and eventually to migrate from town squares and cathedral belfries into the drawing rooms of the gentry. In another fifty years, technology—specifically, the development of the balance spring and regulator—allowed clocks to miniaturize without any sacrifice in accuracy, and to take refuge in the pockets of an emerging class of merchants and manufacturers. In 1687, ten years after the invention of the balance spring, Isaac Newton elevated time in an extraordinary fashion, defining it as an absolute and independent force that progressed at a consistent rate regardless of who was perceiving it, or if it were perceived at all. Even if the universe were entirely empty, time would tick on, echoing through the void like God’s very pulse. And why not? Any mortals with sufficient income to spare could by then carry time around with them, trapping it in a compact silver case, embossed perhaps with golden stars. Whether its owner was awake or asleep, alive or dead, it would tick and tock for eternity. Unless they neglected to wind it. By 1760 the personal timepiece had become sufficiently widespread that a British satirist could complain that “Sir, will you have your clock wound up?” had become “the common expression of street-walkers.”

Over the course of the next century and a half, time, once the property of none and all, would belong to the rich and the powerful—first to the factory owners, then the railway magnates, then to the politicians and military men—divvied up according to the needs of capital and conquest. Technology, the British historian E. P. Thompson observed, was never the decisive factor. Though the key horological innovations had occurred decades earlier, the “general diffusion” of clocks and watches in England did not take place until the 1790s, “at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded an exact synchronization of labour.” Large-scale industrialization, Thompson argued, had reconfigured labor. Workers who had once bartered their skills or their strength now hired out their time. They were paid by the day or the hour rather than the task or piece.

In a very literal sense, time became money. It became something wholly abstract, something independent of our bodies, of the circulation of our blood and the transit of our thoughts and desires. It could be used or misused, spent or wasted, even stolen. Moments of inactivity were suddenly transformed into something that would have been nonsensical a few years earlier: a “theft of time” that vigilant managers strived to guard against. The ironworks in Swalwell, in northeast England, which was for a little while the largest factory in Europe, was the first to employ a monitor tasked with noting every worker’s arrivals and departures to the minute, and with guarding the clock to prevent workers from setting it forward or back. Power over time had become power over labor. Which is to say, over people.

It was at the same moment—which was also the moment of revolutionary upheaval in France and in Haiti, of Condorcet’s frenzied ode to human progress, and, by many measures, the beginning of the modern era—that with the development of the coal-powered steam engine, the industrializing societies of Europe and North America began releasing sufficient carbon dioxide to eventually alter the climate of the earth. It was then too that the stars began to disappear from the skies of the cities and towns of Europe and North America, and from the consciousness of their inhabitants, smeared away by the smoke of all those factories and by the glow of the gas lamps that in the early decades of the 1800s were beginning to illuminate the streets of European capitals.

It was then that time got inside us. Schools for the poor began to teach “time thrift” and to discipline children into “the habits of industry.” Workers, wary of having their pay docked for tardiness, formed a steady market for newly inexpensive, mass-produced watches. Time ticked away in their vest pockets, closer to their hearts than their children or their lovers. (After the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Oglala Sioux visionary Black Elk recalled pulling “something bright” from the belt of a fallen U.S. cavalryman: “It was round and bright and yellow and very beautiful and I put it on me for a necklace. At first it ticked inside, and then it did not anymore. I wore it around my neck for a long time before I found out what it was.”) For workers too, time—the very substance of a life—had become money. Leisure, and the infinite forms of joy it can engender, was refigured as waste. Head-on resistance to this new “time-sense” was rare. “Workers began to fight,” Thompson wrote, “not against time, but about it.” The great labor battles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were waged over the length of the working day—limiting it to twelve hours, then ten, and finally eight. The measure of a worker was no longer his expertise or his vigor, but how fully he had surrendered to the disciplines imposed upon his use of time, and “perhaps also by a repression, not of enjoyments, but of the capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways.”

Time’s dominion was nonetheless incomplete. The hour might be uniform within a single factory or mill, but every municipality in Europe and the United States still kept its own time, setting the town clock to twelve when the sun hung at its highest. Newton’s Principia notwithstanding, time was anything but absolute. In 1857, when it was noon in Washington, D.C., it was 12:08 in New York City and 11:48 in Pittsburgh. Until the railroads began to connect these far-flung cities, no one had any cause to care. But trains had to keep a schedule, and to avoid each other on the tracks, so the railroads took charge of regulating the flow of time. In England, the Great Western Railway solved the problem by announcing, in 1841, that its trains would run on London time, also known as Greenwich Mean Time, wherever between London and Bristol they might happen to be. (In Dombey and Son, Dickens bemoaned the expanding powers of the “monster train”: “There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.”) Frequent travelers purchased watches with two minute hands—one for the local time, another for the railroad’s. In 1847, the secretary of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway appealed to nationalist sentiments while calling for a radical standardization of time: “There is sublimity in the idea of a whole nation stirred by one impulse; in every arrangement, one common signal regulating the movements of a mighty people!”

Across the Atlantic, the complexities were compounded by the enormity of the continent. By 1882, competing American railways ran on fifty-three different times, not counting the local times of the stations that they served. The major railroads organized a General Time Convention, which, with encouragement from the U.S. Signal Service, then part of the Department of War—the military had its own reasons to favor synchronization—managed on November 18, 1883, to establish a uniform, coast-to-coast Standard Railway Time, broken into the four time zones still in use today. (It was earlier that year that the Southern Pacific Railroad had completed a new route connecting New Orleans to the West Coast, for the maintenance of which the railroad had deprived the Chemehuevi and Serrano of access to the springs at the Oasis of Mara.) Noon fell twice in New York that day, once at the usual hour and then again four minutes later, according to the newly christened Eastern Standard Time. “The citizens did their share of the work by carrying the new time to homes, hotels, and stores,” The New York Sun reported the next day. “Everybody who had it, or who even thought he had it, distributed it among his friends, so that by 6 o’clock in the evening, most wide-awake people had it in their houses or their pockets.” Within a year, most of the country had followed the railroad’s lead.

Other innovations would tie the world in a smaller knot still. In 1876, Sandford Fleming, chief engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway, published a pamphlet titled Terrestrial Time, in which he argued for the creation of a single global time standard. The telegraph and the steam locomotive, he wrote, had already “rendered the ordinary practice of reckoning time but ill suited to the circumstances which now exist.” And they had hardly begun—“We may rather assume,” Fleming went on, “that they will still achieve greater triumphs in the work of colonization and civilization.” Australia and Africa, he predicted, would soon “be pierced, perhaps girdled by railways,” and “Asia, with more than half the population of the world, must in due time yield to the civilizing pressure of steam and participate in the general progress.” The solution he proposed was to divide the earth into uniform time zones, one for each hour of the solar day. To illustrate this notion, he imagined the globe bisected at the equator by a plane and split into twenty-four bands of equal width. At the center of this plane, like the dial plate of a watch, he imagined a minute hand and an hour hand. The latter would “rotate from east to west, with precisely the same speed as the earth on its axis.” The planet, so envisioned, had become an enormous clock, its workings concealed in its core.

Fleming would spend the next few years proselytizing for the establishment of “one standard time common to all peoples throughout the world,” whether they wanted it—or even knew about it—or not. The rub was where, exactly, to place the prime meridian. From a scientific perspective it makes no difference which vertical hoop around the planet marks the zero hour, but the British, who already controlled most of the world’s trade, favored one passing through Greenwich, the French though Paris, the Americans Washington. In October 1884, representatives of twenty-six countries—“most of the nations of the earth,” per the U.S. secretary of state at the time—gathered in Washington to select a meridian that would be used for reckoning longitude as well as a single, planetary time. The delegates were naval officers, railroad men, engineers, astronomers, and diplomats. Fleming, who was there representing the British colony of Canada, marveled at the mystical qualities of the object under debate: “When we examine into time in the abstract, the conviction is forced upon us that it bears no resemblance to any sort of matter which comes before our senses; it is immaterial, without form, without substance, without spiritual essence. It is neither solid, liquid, nor gaseous.”

He recovered quickly, taking refuge in the prevailing Newtonian dogma: “Of one thing there can be no doubt. There is only one, and there can only be one flow of time, although our inherited usages have given us a chaotic number of arbitrary reckonings of this one conception . . . the progress of civilization requires a simple and more rational system than we now have.” Over the course of a month, the delegates fought out the details. The French consul general, despairing of imposing Parisian time on the world, demanded the selection of a “neutral” meridian that “should cut no great continent—neither Europe nor America.” (No one was there to argue with him: the remaining continents were represented only by Russia, Turkey, Hawaii, and Japan.) But the globe had already been so extensively divvied out among colonial empires that no neutral ground could be found. Even the Bering Strait, an American representative speculated, might not remain unclaimed for long: “Who knows when America will step over and purchase half of Siberia?”

Eventually, the delegates—with France abstaining—bowed to imperial realities. The prime meridian, and the basis for all terrestrial navigation, would pass directly through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, on the south shore of the Thames, within the city boundaries of London. Time would begin, and end, in the capital of the most powerful empire on earth. Each new day would henceforth commence at midnight, Greenwich Mean Time. The French delegate, who surely would not have objected had Paris been chosen, appeared to relish his role as killjoy. “Science appears here,” he complained, “only as the humble vassal of the powers of the day to consecrate and crown their success.

“But, gentlemen,” he went on to warn, “nothing is so transitory and fugitive as power and riches. All the great empires of the world, all financial, industrial, and commercial prosperities of the world, have given us a proof of it, each in turn.” Time has, as they say, proven him correct. The vast colonial empire controlled by the British would collapse in fewer than eighty years. Time, if little else, would still be theirs.

It had been months, I realized, since I’d seen any friends, so I drove to L.A. for the weekend. I went first to Echo Park for a coffee with B. He and his wife live across the street from the apartment where I lived for eleven years. It was haunted—literally: there had been a murder-suicide in my bedroom a few years before I moved in, and a ghost occasionally showed itself to a houseguest. The elderly owner and her still-older brother, who lived in the apartment next door, were both hoarders. Every year or two the city inspectors made them clear a path through the crap on the porch, but apparently they died because the house had been sold recently and the porch was filled with potted plants instead of broken TVs and toilet bowls and castaway toys. Whatever the rent is now, I imagine the ghosts have not moved out.

I had almost forgotten about the bougainvillea, how bright they are, explosions of pink climbing the stucco walls, and how soft the light is in the afternoon, how it makes the colors seem magically deeper and it really does feel like anything is possible. For a long time, that light was enough to sustain me there. I took the Harbor Freeway down to Long Beach to see some friends. I spent the night on their couch, and in the morning I woke before anyone else and drove down to the beach for a run. I wanted to see the ocean, to smell it, and to listen to the surf roll in. When I got there I couldn’t smell a thing. The breakwater around the harbor had tamed the waves to nothing and the oil platforms and cargo ships blocked most of the horizon, but there it was nonetheless in all its patient blueness. Later, when I had showered and was sitting at the kitchen counter drinking coffee, my friends’ twelve-year-old son C. emerged from his room in a blue bathrobe printed with ringed planets and stars. He asked me when I was going to write a new book. I told him I had started one already. He asked what it was going to be about and I did my best to explain. He told me there was a Greek god named Chronos that I should look into who could make time slow down or speed up. He could even stop time, if he wanted.

After breakfast I drove to Alhambra to meet S. and D. We hiked up to the top of Echo Mountain in the national forest north of the city. The trail was crowded but rain earlier in the week had cleared the air and we could see the sun shining off the ocean way out at the end of the long, straight boulevards, the glass towers of downtown Los Angeles rising like a castle keep from the low mess of gridded streets. At the top of the trail were the ruins of the White City. At the turn of the century it had been a grand resort with tennis courts and a dance hall and its own little zoo. All of it had been connected to Pasadena by rail, the tracks ascending the steep face of the mountain. There were just a few rocks there now, the outlines of the foundations.

A little farther up, we found the ruins of the observatory. Thaddeus Lowe, the autodidact former chief aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps, inventor of the ice machine and of his own patented process for the production of hydrogen gas, had built the resort and the railway and in 1893 began paying an astronomer to live on-site and deliver lectures to the public about the wonders of the heavens. By 1905 every building but the observatory had been destroyed by fire, wind, and floods. In 1928 a storm tore away the dome, blowing away the entire building with the resident astronomer, the third to hold that post, crouched inside to save the precious lenses. All that’s left now is a hexagonal foundation and the chimneylike stone tower that once supported the weight of the telescope. “I don’t know why they thought anything would last up here,” laughed S., his foot resting on the stones.

We talked about bears and S. and D.’s daughter in Alaska, about the smallness of literary politics and the anti-gentrification battles in Boyle Heights, how they had fallen into sectarian skirmishes like back in the seventies all over again. D. told me she visits her mom a few times a week and after dinner they sit and drink beer and watch the news in Spanish on Univision. Every night it’s the same thing, she said, more ICE raids and people saying don’t call the police for anything or even the fire department because ICE might come with them and take away your dad or your mom or your kids. When we got back to the house she made taquitos and a salad, and sautéed corn, squash, and nopales with garlic and the smoky paprika I brought them from Spain last year. S. talked about his students up at CalArts and how incurious they are, how disappointed he had been by their reactions, or lack of reactions, to the Kenneth Rexroth poem he had assigned the week before.

They had both left for work when I got up this morning. I poured myself what remained of the coffee and found The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth propped up against the chimney by the door. I looked up the poem S. had taught that week, “The Signature of All Things.” It’s named for a work by the seventeenth-century German mystic Jacob Boehme. Rexroth reads it in the first stanza while lying beside a waterfall, watching the leaves and the sunshine tumble down around him: “The saint saw the world as streaming / In the electrolysis of love.” Light drifts in fragments throughout, scattered bits of divinity glimmering in through everything. At the end, the poet cuts up a rotten log and leaves it in the sun to dry for kindling. That night he steps out on his porch and looks up, “At the swaying islands of stars.” He sees something gleaming beneath him too, phosphorescence glowing in the wood he had chopped, everywhere, above and below, “scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.”

On the drive back to Las Vegas I passed the solar-thermal plant again. On sunny days, I had read, its mirrors heat the air to temperatures as high as one thousand degrees Fahrenheit, killing as many as six thousand birds a year. Workers at the plant call them “streamers”: they ignite in flight and streak smoking to the ground. The sun was high this time and the towers were blinding bright with all the fragmented and reflected sunlight bouncing onto them and concentrating there. Around them on the desert floor the mirrors trapped little chips of sky, hundreds of them, every one of them blue and filled with clouds.

It was a man named Samuel Pierpont Langley, chief astronomer of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Observatory, who innovated the sale of time—not any individual worker’s time, but time itself, delivered by telegram twice daily. The observatory, which did not have a mountaintop resort to bring in revenue, had fallen into debt, so Langley established a subscription service whereby local jewelers could pay to receive the time, astronomically determined, and accurately set the clocks and watches in their showrooms. In 1869 the Pennsylvania Railroad, soon to be the most-traveled railroad in the United States, became the first of forty-two railways to sign on. From its conception, standardized time was privatized time. When the heads of the major U.S. railways later agreed to divide the country into uniform time zones, it was a signal from the Allegheny Observatory that marked the first noon of Eastern Standard Time.

With the income he brought in selling time subscriptions, Langley was free to fund his more ambitious research on the effects of solar radiation on the earth’s atmosphere. In 1880, he invented the bolometer, a device capable of measuring electromagnetic radiation. With it, after years of observation, he was able to estimate the temperature on the moon and to determine that all prior estimates of the absorptive capacity of the earth’s atmosphere had been far too low. The data Langley compiled would allow the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius to more precisely calculate the degree to which the sun’s energy is absorbed by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If coal-powered industrialization continued to the point that carbon dioxide emissions doubled, Arrhenius predicted in 1896, the surface temperature of the planet would increase by between five and six degrees centigrade. (By that time Langley had taken over the helm of the Smithsonian, which means that the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in which James Mooney’s findings on the Ghost Dance were published, was addressed directly to him.)

Arrhenius, whose perspective may have been warped as much by a lifetime of Scandinavian winters as by unbending faith in progress, regarded the prospect of planetary warming as yet another perk of human ingenuity. Should the earth’s atmosphere heat up a few degrees, he remarked, “We would then have some right to indulge in the pleasant belief that our descendants, albeit after many generations, might live under a milder sky and in less barren surroundings than is our lot at present.”

Maybe I’m doing it wrong, reading all these books and writing every day. This, from Barbara Tedlock’s Time and the Highland Maya: “Understanding is achieved by a combination of several actions: the mixing, grabbing, and arranging of piles of tz’ite seeds; the counting and interpreting of the 260-day divinatory calendar; and the jumping and speaking of the diviner’s blood.”

Time’s newfound sovereignty was not universally welcomed. The workers who stooped beneath the strictures of the new regime rarely had the opportunity—or indeed the time—to record their protests for posterity. The writers, though—because a writer is above all a person who makes the time to write—complained bitterly of its oppressiveness. Some of them anyway. Charles Baudelaire, the great and bilious poet of night and crowds, the gutter and the boulevard, included a poem called “The Clock” in the second edition of The Flowers of Evil, published in 1861. “Clock!” it begins, “Sinister god, appalling, unperturbed . . .” In six brief stanzas, Baudelaire portrayed time as an evil deity, an archer shooting sorrow into human hearts, an insect sucking up life through its “filthy proboscis,” a sort of metal-throated robot, and a gambler who never loses and never has to cheat. The clock, which elsewhere was standing in for progress and the inevitability, strength, and power of the railroad and the steam engine, became for Baudelaire a memento mori, a throwback to the reaper’s hourglass.

Edgar Allen Poe’s stories and poems also associate clocks with murder, torture, death. (Baudelaire, who introduced Poe’s work to the French, was conscious of their kinship.) Think of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the too-clever killer is given away by the still-beating heart of his victim, which thuds on with “much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.” Or “The Pit and the Pendulum,” in which the narrator, imprisoned by the Inquisition, awakens in his dungeon to see the “figure of Time as he is commonly represented” painted on the ceiling above him, except that instead of a scythe Time holds “a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks.” This one has a sharpened edge and is descending, one swing at a time, closer and closer to the narrator’s heart. Time and Death are almost interchangeable.

I could go on for pages about Poe: “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” with its dark judgment of the “infantine imbecility” of the notion of progress, the comic “A Predicament,” in which Signora Psyche Zenobia gets stuck in a clocktower and is decapitated by the sharpened minute hand, but continues to narrate the story, even delivering a speech, which her body “could hear but indistinctly without ears.” But Baudelaire, whom Benjamin adored, also wrote, in The Flowers of Evil, a poem called “Owls.” It’s a sonnet: four short lines, then four short lines, then three and three again. His owls do not fly. He does not say how many there are, but for the length of the poem, they never leave the tree. They perch there, neatly arrayed, “like strange gods.” Or “foreign gods,” depending on which translation of étrangers you prefer. (In her version, Edna St. Vincent Millay went with “eastern gods,” believing, I suppose, that the Orient offered a successful fusion of both connotations.) If Hegel found the owl’s wisdom in nocturnal flight, Baudelaire found it in stillness: “Without stirring they will remain, up to the melancholy hour / when shadow, pushing the sun aslant, takes over.” The restless human ambition that prods history forward is not a virtue here. It’s a curse. We are all “drunk on passing shadows,” chasing the illusion that things are better elsewhere, or will be, or could be, stooping always under the punishment we bear for “having wanted a change of place.”

Owls are smarter. They don’t fly until they have to, until it’s night.

Last night I dreamed of Walter Benjamin. I don’t remember much about the dream, or anything, really, other than a certain mist of uneasiness. It still hasn’t lifted. I have a bad cold and haven’t gone out much or written anything for days. In Washington the usual theatrics. On Saturday a headline in The Times ended with the sentence “No One Knows What Comes Next.” Some quorum of editors considered this worth printing. How uncertain must uncertainty be before it is counted as news?

I can think of at least one exception to E. P. Thompson’s generalization that workers in the nineteenth century did not fight “against time, but about it”: the much-maligned anarchist tailor Martial Bourdin, who died shortly after attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.* Other than the sensational circumstances of his death, next to nothing is known about him. He was by most accounts a taciturn man, and those who knew him well had every incentive to stay quiet, or to lie. We know that Bourdin was born in France, in Tours, in 1858, and at the age of sixteen was jailed for two months for the crime of “having attempted . . . to organize a meeting.” Three or four years later he emigrated to London at the invitation of an older brother, Henri, who had been active in London anarchist circles at least as far back as the 1880s. The brothers worked together as dressmakers, along with Henri’s wife and her sister, out of a workshop in central London, not far from where the BT Tower now stands, a short walk from the room Bourdin rented on Fitzroy Street.

By February 15, 1894, business was apparently slack. Bourdin was out of work. That afternoon, “respectably dressed,” per the next day’s Times, he walked to Westminster and caught a tram to Greenwich. He got off at the last stop, asked the conductor for directions to Greenwich Park, and was seen entering the park shortly thereafter, carrying a parcel. At 4:45 p.m., two employees of the Greenwich Observatory, a Mr. Thackeray and Mr. Hollis, heard what they later described as a “sharp and clear detonation, followed by a noise like a shell going through the air.” They rushed outside and saw a man crouched on the path just below the observatory. The bomb Bourdin had been carrying had blown off his hand, torn a wide and jagged hole in his abdomen, and scattered bits of gore to a distance of nearly sixty yards in the direction of the observatory wall. He was sufficiently lucid to pronounce the words “Take me home.” They took him instead to the Seaman’s Hospital, a half mile away, where he died within the hour.

Bourdin’s intentions were not at all clear, but the “narrow, zigzag, and secluded path” on which he was found, The Times pointed out, “leads practically nowhere except to the Observatory.” Several letters, a small and broken bottle of sulfuric acid, and thirteen British pounds in gold, a considerable sum at the time, were found in Bourdin’s pockets, but no further clues to his motivations. As is often the case, the truth would be useful to no one. Britain at the time had the most liberal asylum laws in Europe. Foreign-born radicals and dissidents were able to live in London under relatively little scrutiny from the state. Not everyone was pleased with this. “The ‘right of asylum,’ may be a sacred thing, but we can have too much of it,” huffed the conservative St James’s Gazette two days after the bombing. Perhaps this sounds familiar.

Other newspapers fanned the flames, rushing to speculate that Bourdin’s attempt on the observatory had been but one attack among many planned by an international anarchist cabal, “the most desperate and dangerous of any revolutionary plot that has ever had its headquarters in London.” Police sources initially told the press that there was “practically no room for doubt” that the explosion was an accident and that Bourdin, knowing that his arrest was imminent, had been attempting “to rid himself safely of the explosives” when he stumbled over a root. Politics appears to have intervened. At a coroner’s inquest several days later, the queen’s chief inspector of explosives testified that he could “arrive at no other conclusion” but that Bourdin’s intention was to act “against the Observatory, or its contents, or its inmates.” This would become the official version.

For their part, British anarchist circles, eager to preserve the relative ease of their existence in England, distanced themselves from Bourdin. One prominent anarchist editor published a pamphlet tarring him as the dupe of an agent provocateur in the pay of English authorities. Nine years after Bourdin’s death, Olivia and Helen Rossetti, who as teenagers had founded the radical journal The Torch, expanded on this version in the pseudonymous novel A Girl Among the Anarchists, in which “an obscure little French Anarchist” blows himself up in a London park. The observatory doesn’t rate a mention. The Rossettis’ cousin, the novelist Ford Madox Ford—they were also the nieces of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, of Lady Lilith and “Eden Bower” fame—later alluded to the bombing in passing to his friend Joseph Conrad, dismissing Bourdin as “half an idiot.”

Be careful what you say to a writer: Conrad would make the anecdote the basis of a novel, The Secret Agent, published in 1907. In his version the anarchists—and pretty much everyone else—are foul, cynical creatures, motivated more by sloth, vanity, and greed than by anything like a principle. The unfortunate Bourdin would be transmuted into Stevie, “poor Stevie,” dumb and innocent, with a squint and a drooping lip, fooled into carrying out an attack on the observatory by his grotesque and unscrupulous brother-in-law Verloc, an agent in the pay of an unnamed but reactionary Eastern European state. “What is the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie recognise—eh, Mr Verloc?” asks Verloc’s employer, the sinister Mr. Vladimir, and immediately answers his own question. “‘The sacrosanct fetish of to-day is science . . . Yes,’ he continued, with a contemptuous smile, ‘the blowing up of the first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration.’”

In an “Author’s Note,” published thirteen years later, Conrad, the great psychologist, played coy, describing Bourdin’s final act as incomprehensible, “a bloodstained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought.” It is a curious admission. In his other novels, Conrad was able to parse even the subtlest and most paradoxical aspects of human behavior. But in The Secret Agent, it was important to him to maintain that Bourdin’s “outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way; so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea.” Stevie had to be a fool, Verloc a scoundrel, Mr. Vladimir a devil in blue silk socks. What could not be admitted, by any means, was the possibility that a sane man, ruthless in his idealism, might want to wage war against Time.

I neglected to make any plans for the weekend and ended up staying in the apartment for almost twenty-four hours before I realized I needed to get out. I’m not counting a stroll to the mailbox and a coffee on the stoop. I drove to Henderson, to a running trail paved alongside a wash that snaked through the suburban cul-de-sacs. I could see them behind the fences, identical houses, identical driveways, identical streets, but the desert willows along the wash and the blooming jasmine in the backyards perfumed the air, and I didn’t mind the view. I checked Twitter before I went to bed that night and found myself scrolling past image after image of what looked like sleeping children, their faces a strange gray-blue. A chemical gas attack on Dhouma, east of Damascus, one of the few areas still held by Syrian rebels. I didn’t click the links, didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to know.

Later I went out for Chinese noodles with T., the other fellow at the Institute here. She’s just back from her book tour, so we celebrated with dessert at one of the yuppie places downtown: bread pudding made with donuts from the artisanal hipster donut shop next door. I dropped her off and spent the next hour sitting up in bed staring at my phone. There had been a missile attack on a Syrian airbase not far from Homs. The same base that Israel struck in February. Fourteen killed this time, several of them Iranians. A tweet from the AP did not reassure: “BREAKING: U.S. officials: The United States is not carrying out airstrikes in Syria.” Then more reports: Israel was bombing Gaza, for no reason that made sense. Now Syria and Russia are saying it was Israeli F-14s that struck the Syrian base. Israel has not denied it. This morning the Rhino announced he would decide how to respond soon, probably by the end of the day. If Russia was responsible for the Dhouma attack, he said, “it’s going to be very tough, very tough. Everybody’s going to pay a price.”

Bourdin’s choice of target put him in curious company. In 1910 Sir Robert Anderson, a lifelong veteran of the British secret political police, published a memoir with the jaunty title The Lighter Side of My Official Life. On the day of the explosion in Greenwich Park, he revealed, “information reached me that a French tailor named Bourdin had left his shop in Soho with a bomb in his pocket.” The shop was in Fitzrovia, but regardless, Sir Robert complained, all he could do was dispatch officers to sites he thought an anarchist might be likely to attack, and wait. Bourdin’s actual destination, he wrote, “was the last place the police would have thought of watching.”

“In war the guns of an enemy would no doubt spare an astronomical Observatory, for none but savages would wish to injure an institution of that kind.”

It’s a nice thought anyway. Between 1943 and 1945, British and American bombers destroyed observatories in Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, and Königsberg, but Sir Robert was by then long dead.

There’s an owl in the middle stanza of that Kenneth Rexroth poem, the one about Jacob Boehme and the chips of living light. It’s a little one and it flies, Rexroth wrote, “on wings more still than my breath.” It lands above him, on a branch. He’s not reading anymore at this point. He’s standing at the edge of a forest, alone. The moon is full. The poet shines a flashlight up the tree trunk and catches the owl’s eyes in the beam. It stares back at him and cocks its head, as curious as he is.

______________

* Actually, I can think of one other: in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin mentions that when workers in Paris rose up against the monarchy of Charles X in July 1830, they “simultaneously and independently” began shooting at public clocks around the city.