7.

The paloverdes in the bank parking lot are blooming bright and yellow now. Great-tailed grackles are courting in the trees, their feathers a black so deep and oily that it seems to reflect every color at once. Four Palestinians were killed in Gaza today, one of them a fifteen-year-old boy, shot in the head by a sniper near the fence. A video of the shooting is circulating on Twitter. I didn’t watch it. The person who sleeps on the foam mat is a woman, it turns out. I had seen a man on it before, but he seems to be gone. She unrolled the mat in the alley today and sat there, reclining in a narrow strip of shade, feeding the pigeons, smoking cigarettes. It’s hot now, over ninety, and it occurred to me while walking to pick up my car from the shop—the air-conditioning chose this week to quit—that Las Vegas might be easier to take if I understood it not as a city but as a dream the desert is dreaming about itself. This makes more sense than any historical, economic, or sociological analysis I have come across so far. It explains more too. Walking in the sun on the dingy, gum-stained sidewalk along the vast, five-lane expanse of Charleston Boulevard, past the EZ Pawn and the Speedee Cash and the empty, potholed parking lots and the immigration and divorce attorneys’ offices in low, beige stucco houses, I found the thought reassuring even if it means, as it must, that I am a part of the dream too, and it will soon transmute into another dream, as dreams always do, and then disappear and fade quickly from the recollections of the dreamer, whoever that may be.

I meant to get to Jacob Boehme earlier, back when I first read him, after I stumbled across his name in that Rexroth poem in S. and D.’s living room. I’ve been reading his books and books about his books and his life and it all took a few weeks to digest. Boehme was twenty-five when the vision hit him. The year was 1600 and all was well, or should have been. Boehme had only months before opened his own shop in the town of Görlitz, on what is now the German side of the border with Poland, a few miles north of the Czech Republic. (None of those states existed then.) Born to a peasant family and apprenticed to a cobbler at fourteen, he had ascended to the rank of burgher with all its attendant privileges, and his wife, a butcher’s daughter, had just given birth to a son. Boehme had done well for a boy from the country, but he had nonetheless fallen into a deep, extended melancholy. In all things he had noticed evil fouling whatever good there was. God did not appear to intervene, for “it went as well in this world with the wicked as with the virtuous.” Boehme was “perplexed,” he wrote, “and exceedingly troubled,” and even in those tempestuous times—the Protestant Reformation was not yet a century old, and myriad strands of belief and dissent swirled through Görlitz and its surroundings—he could find no scripture or creed that gave him comfort.

When it came it came without warning. A glint of sunlight in a pewter dish caught Boehme’s attention. His world shattered: “In this light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in and by all the creatures, even in herbs and grass it knew God, who he is, and how he is, and what his will is.” Everything was suffused with love. Boehme felt like a man resurrected, he wrote later, like he had been dead before and only now “perceived and recognized the Being of all beings, the Byss and the Abyss.” He could not adequately express what he had experienced, he wrote, “either in speaking or writing, neither can it be compared to anything,” but it gave him the mission that would be his sustenance and his torment for the remainder of his life: “to describe the being of God.” He had little formal education, but he would nonetheless attempt to get it down in writing, “though I should irritate or enrage the whole world, the devil, and all the gates of hell.”

His first effort, the book that would be known as Aurora, took him twelve years to write. He lent the still-unfinished manuscript to a sympathetic local nobleman who was sufficiently impressed that he had the work copied and distributed. One copy ended up in the hands of the chief pastor of Görlitz, who denounced Boehme from the pulpit, demanding that the civil authorities punish the shoemaker for his heretical views. (Boehme had been imprudent enough to suggest that God is everywhere, and heaven too, “even in that very place where thou standest and goest.”) The manuscript—that copy, at least—was confiscated. Boehme, after a brief imprisonment, was obliged to vow that he would write no more. For six years he kept his word, but when he started writing again in 1618, he could not stop. Between that year and 1620 he completed no fewer than seven works, a task surely not made easier by the fact that he had given up his shop and turned to buying and selling yarn, gloves, books, and other goods, traveling from town to town in a landscape rendered perilous by the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War.

In 1621, Boehme wrote The Signature of All Things, which Kenneth Rexroth would read some 320 years later, lying in the shade beside a waterfall, and which I would read another three-quarters of a century after that, in bed in my apartment and hunched over a table in the fourth-floor reading room of the library at UNLV, my hands green in the fluorescent light. The full title is impressive: The Signature of All Things Shewing the Sign and Signification of the Several Forms and Shapes in the Creation and What the Beginning, Ruin, and Cure of Every Thing Is. It Proceeds out of Eternity into Time, and Again out of Time into Eternity and Comprizes All Mysteries. Ahem. Like all of Boehme’s works, it can be difficult going. By 1621 he had dispensed with the apologies for the modesty of his learning that appear throughout Aurora (“Or dost thou think my writing is too earthly?”), but his prose had not grown easier to decipher. Boehme did not develop arguments discursively so much as layer on metaphors and motifs, trying on new ones and circling back to old ones. In The Signature he employs the spiraling paradoxes common to mystical theologies, freely combining the technical terms of Paracelsian alchemy with words of his own coinage. The result is often not easily comprehensible: “Understand it thus; Sul is in the first Principle the Free-Will, or the Lubet in the Nothing to Something, it is in the Liberty without Nature; Phur is the Desire of the free Lubet, and makes in itself, in the Phur, viz. in the Desire, an Essence . . .”

Despite the myth that surrounds him, which he did his part to encourage, Boehme was not a barely literate shoemaker informed solely by solitary ecstasies. He read a lot. Through friends and correspondents he had become familiar with aspects of Kabbalah, the Christian mystical tradition, and the Neoplatonist and Hermetic strands in Renaissance theology and thought. Görlitz was home to a significant community of followers of the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist, physician, and astrologer Paracelsus, on whom Boehme’s otherwise mystifying talk of Sul and Phur can be blamed: for Paracelsus, sulphur was one of three basic substances that comprise all things, the others being mercury and salt. (Splitting the word into its component syllables appears to have been Boehme’s innovation.) The Signature gets its title from the old medieval “doctrine of signatures,” or Parcelsus’s version of it, which held that all things from the heavenly bodies to the leaves of the smallest plant are related by complex webs of correspondence, analogy, and influence that can be decoded through their “signatures,” stamps of invisible essence that show themselves in external appearances. “By the outward shapes and qualities of things,” Paracelsus had written, “we may know their inward virtues, which God hath put in them for the use of man.”

At the crudest and most practical level this meant, for instance, that herbs with heart-shaped leaves could be used to treat coronary troubles, but Boehme extended the doctrine well beyond the medical and botanical spheres. The signature, for him, was the mark of the divine that gives things in their teeming multiplicity a specific form and character. It is what makes things what they are while relating them to all others, and hence stands in for the sheer, creative exuberance of the spirit. “The greatest Understanding lies in the Signature,” Boehme wrote, “wherein Man . . . may not only learn to know himself, but therein also he may learn to know the Essence of all Essences; for by the external Form of all Creatures, by their Instigation, Inclination and Desire, also by their Sound, Voice and Speech which they utter, the hidden Spirit is known; for Nature has given to every Thing its Language . . . Every Thing speaks . . . and continually manifests, declares, and sets forth itself.”

This was Boehme’s radical and borderline heretical claim, that the signature of God can be read in all things. All of existence—good and evil, pure and impure—is the language of God. Everything is speaking—shouting, even, if you know how to listen. Literacy, learning, elevation to the clergy or to high academic post won’t help. Nature forms a second set of scriptures. It too is a book authored by God. Which means that everything is writing: “The whole outward visible World with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward Spiritual World.”

There is nothing fixed in this vision, and nothing fated. “There is a continual Combat in the Earth,” Boehme wrote. The chain of microcosmic relations is infinite. Everything contains everything else and holds its opposite within it, which means that everything is writhing. “In the heavenly Being there is also a Property of a Seething,” Boehme wrote at one point; at another that “the Being of Beings is a wrestling Power.” God’s love and anger are of a single piece. Apparent opposites are locked in constant battle, spawning one another as they spar. A man inclined to goodness might be turned by wrath to evil and an evil man made good with love. Just as for Paracelsus a cure existed for all possible ailments, for Boehme, in his profound alchemical optimism, the same divine principles that populate the heavens exist in full within every individual. If one element is overabundant and causing harm, it can be countered by its antagonists. No ailment exists that cannot be cured.

Three years after Boehme wrote The Signature, his old adversary, Görlitz’s chief pastor, got his hands on another one of Boehme’s books. He again denounced Boehme as a heretic and a “common Disturber of the Peace.” He seemed at least as offended by Boehme’s departure from his assigned station in life as by the contents of his works, which, the pastor fumed, stank “abominably of Shoemakers Pitch and Blacking.” Boehme was summoned once more before the town council. This time he was encouraged to “take his departure as soon as possible.” That was in April. Boehme fled, but returned to Görlitz in November, gravely ill, and died soon after. The local clergy refused to bury him until, after three days, they were ordered to do so by the town council. The pastor to whom the task of delivering the sermon fell prefaced his remarks by explaining that he was there only because he had been ordered to. He would rather be 120 miles away, he insisted, “had such an Excursion been allowed me.” The cross that Boehme’s followers erected on his grave would be “bespattered with filth, mangled and mutilated,” and destroyed before the year was out. It was made of black wood and painted with esoteric symbols—a child resting his head on a skull, a lion in a golden crown clutching a flaming sword and a burning heart, and an eagle with a branch of lilies in its beak, treading on a snake.

More new studies. The Gulf Stream is weakening, and fast. The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting more rapidly than at any time since 1550, which is as early as the data goes. The polar seas are growing warmer, causing the Atlantic Ocean currents that push warm water north from the tropics and cool water south from the pole to lose force. They are weaker now than they have been at any point in the last sixteen hundred years, as far back as climate scientists have analyzed. The consequences of a more complete collapse—which until very recently scientists thought was centuries off—would be catastrophic. During the last ice age, a weakening of Atlantic currents caused winter temperatures to drop as much as ten degrees centigrade, or eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, over just three years. There is no bright side: summer temperatures will continue to rise.

Boehme’s influence would nonetheless be great. We know that Leibniz read him, and that Isaac Newton copied out long sections of Boehme’s prose by hand. Newton’s near deification of “Absolute Time,” which “of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external,” in this context begins to make a different kind of sense. William Blake, who wrote of holding “infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour,” admired and adored Boehme. Thomas De Quincey gave a complete four-volume edition of Boehme’s works as a gift to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had already been reading Boehme for years. In the first decade of the nineteenth century Boehme became the darling of the German Romantics, and it was likely through them, in the university town of Jena, that Hegel encountered the work of the man he called “the German cobbler of Lusatia, of whom we have no reason to be ashamed.”

Such ambivalent praise would mark all Hegel’s estimations of Boehme. On the one hand, he gave him pride of place as “the first German philosopher” and devoted to him what amounts to a full chapter of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, in which he described reading Boehme as “a wondrous experience,” and praised his “profound and German soul.” On the other, he expressed near-constant frustration at the homey inexactness of Boehme’s argumentation, complaining of a “most frightful and painful struggle between his mind and consciousness and his powers of expression.” He at one point referred to Boehme as a “complete barbarian” and elsewhere regretted his “crude and barbarous presentation,” condemning the “barbaric fashion” of his speech and the “unmistakably barbarous” quality of his articulation. The usual hierarchies were in effect. Boehme should have counted himself lucky not to have been esteemed a savage. Hegel’s main gripe was that, “in order to put his thoughts into words,” Boehme had relied on “powerful, sensuous images.” Just as hieroglyphs and other forms of ideogrammatic writing still rely on pictorial symbols, expressing the primitive barbarism of their creators, Boehme had failed to ascend to the ethereal abstractions of truly philosophical thought.

For all that, Hegel found much to appreciate. Boehme’s main concern, in Hegel’s reading, was to reconcile the absolute unity of God with the existence of negativity and evil. If God was perfect, why was the world so royally fucked? Boehme’s solution—an expansive notion of the divine that is eternally wrestling with itself, creating both itself and the universe through that constant, teeming conflict—was not altogether different from Hegel’s understanding of a human world shaped by God’s ceaseless effort to reach a more complete self-awareness, an effort that takes place dialectically, through the interaction of opposing forces. I don’t mean to suggest that Hegel got it all from Boehme. Or any of it in as straightforward a manner as “influence.” It would be impossible to parse out the depth of Boehme’s impact on Hegel, when and how it arrived, where precisely in his thought it fell. It would also be boring beyond belief. But there is nonetheless a clear kinship to which Hegel, despite his distaste for Boehme’s not-quite-civilized modes of expression, was not ashamed to confess.

What I want to suggest here is only that it is possible to see something of Boehme’s profound, metaphysical optimism flowing through Hegel’s understanding of history as Spirit’s ascent to self-consciousness via the apparent chaos of human endeavor. In other words, that progress, and Hegel’s notion that humanity was advancing through identifiable stages toward a certain goal, was not solely a murderous and narcissistic, Eurocentric chauvinism, though it certainly was that. It was also marked by a faith—worked out via a wide and largely subterranean network of mystical, Kabbalistic, Hermetic, gnostic, and other creosotal influences stretching back over millennia and across continental and religious boundaries—that humans might approach ever closer to the divine because God is seething forth in everything. And somehow this notion, at once ancient and obvious, that everything partakes in the sacred and everything is speaking because everything is alive, that the past and the future both hum within the present because everything holds everything else inside it, would be transmuted over centuries and under the influence of various competing and contradictory forces into another creed entirely. One that insisted, and still insists, that only humans count, and only certain fair-fleshed humans at that, and that with the possible exception of God, everything in the cosmos is dead, or if not actually dead then silent, inert, barren, and empty of intelligence or consciousness, worth only whatever passing use we can put it to before we toss it away. Or as Hegel put it in a lengthy passage devoted to denying the humanity of Africans, “As soon as man emerges as a human being, he stands in opposition to nature, and it is this alone which makes him a human being.”

The being of beings is a wrestling power. We can’t say that we weren’t warned.

After dinner L. and I walked down to Fremont Street. The sidewalks were deserted as always, but close to the old casino district they grew more populated, at first just with ranters and drunks but more and more with shoals of tourists. As the density of bars and the brightness of the neon lights increased we began to encounter wandering herds of white men in pressed shorts and bright T-shirts printed with the names of other tourist destinations, middle-aged couples looking at everything but each other, gaggles of women in their forties already rowdy before ten o’clock. We walked beneath a neon cowboy and a neon martini glass and a neon shoe and then it happened. Fremont Street became the Fremont Street Experience.

To explain that the Fremont Street Experience is a pedestrian mall would be a bit like saying that peyote is a small and spineless cactus, or that Las Vegas is a medium-sized city in the American Southwest. The first thing you see—though you won’t likely notice them because your eyes will be on the flashing lights, and the people, and the lights and the people, and because they’ve been painted in outrageous colors to better blend with the environment—are the bollards and concrete barriers that block the entrance to speeding vans and would-be car bombs. Just past them, beneath the restaurant that offers free quadruple bacon cheeseburgers to customers weighing in at 350 pounds and up, the crowd begins. And the lights, and the music, and the zipline overhead. Above it all hangs a sort of shimmering canopy, a vaulted ceiling that is also a screen, a four-block-long LCD display, bright as Vegas daylight.

I tried not to look up but every time I did it was blaring advertisements for itself, for the experience in which we were already partaking. Every few minutes a new batch of zipliners slid silently beneath it, vaguely human silhouettes blurring by overhead and disappearing into the blinding light above. The crowd—and we were part of it—milled aimlessly, circulating like shards of plastic caught in the slow but inevitable drag of a riptide. They fell in and out of the casinos and bars and paused for selfies and chatted and even flirted here and there but mainly they let the current take them, their gazes sliding covertly from side to side as if they were searching for something shameful. Almost no one smiled. Violence—muted and disguised but tangible still—flowed in the spaces between bodies. L. asked me if she was imagining it or if I felt it too. I reassured her that I could feel it buzzing past.

Cover bands were blasting country rock and heavy metal from competing stages at opposite ends of the thoroughfare. Two angry magicians and a crew of tired break-dancers worked the crowd. Other performers had grifts that were harder to pin down. There was a young woman in boxing gloves—for a few bucks you could take a photo of her punching your spouse—and there were pretty girls in short shorts and bikini tops waving handfuls of bills in the air. The hustle was universal. There were two young black women in shiny leather bras with whips tucked beneath their arms, baby doms waiting for a heavy-pocketed sub to stumble past. There was an obese goth with her top off, white breasts spilling over her belly, her nipples Xed over with duct tape. Her partner slumped beside her, sullen in a grungy bear suit. There was a muscle man in a mask and platform heels, a topless woman wearing most of a dirt-smeared nun’s habit, a wheelchair with miniature American flags protruding from the spokes and armrests, its aged occupant nodding off over a Sharpied sign that said he was a veteran. Even the guy lugging the WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS NOW GET THE FUCK OUT sign was taking tips.

We dodged into the Golden Nugget for a drink, but the people inside were too grimly purposeful, as if they were all being tugged by invisible threads to the tables and barstools and slot machines, and there were security cameras everywhere and the gambler closest to us had a shaved head and an iron cross tattooed on his triceps and even the relative quiet of the bar was vibrating with despair, so we gave ourselves up to the Experience again and ejected ourselves onto the first open side street. A block away the streets were dark again and almost quiet. We gulped it down. The emptiness that had before seemed menacing now felt like a salve. An old, white-bearded man in a wheelchair looked up as we walked by. One of his eyes was clouded and dead. I reached into my pocket for a dollar, but he didn’t want money. He just asked me for the time.

Borges wrote about Boehme as well. He mentions him, anyway, in a story called “The Secret Miracle.” His protagonist is one Jaromir Hladik, a Czech writer imprisoned by the Gestapo and awaiting execution. (Borges had a thing for prison cells.) Hladik is the author, Borges writes, of a history of the diverse notions of eternity so far devised by men, another work on the “indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme,” and an unfinished drama in verse. The story contains its share of Borgesian folds and doublings, dreams and fictions within the fiction, hallucinations and dreams within those, but Boehme gets no further elaboration, at least not explicitly. He is present enough, though, in the story’s suggestion that being teems with hidden abundance, and in a notion of writing that requires no ink or stylus.

Hladik, terrified, passes the hours of his imprisonment imagining the circumstances of his execution in exhaustive detail, then varying them slightly on the theory that reality rarely overlaps with our expectations: if he can run through all the possibilities, perhaps he won’t be shot. Finally he despairs. He begs God for just one more year to finish writing his play, so that he will have accomplished something and won’t have lived in vain. He dreams that night of the Clementinum, the great Baroque library in Prague. A librarian tells him that “God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of the Clementinum’s four hundred thousand tomes” and then takes off his glasses to reveal two dead eyes: he has gone blind searching for it. At that moment another patron approaches the desk to return an atlas. Hladik flips it open to a map of India and touches one of the tiniest letters. A voice speaks suddenly from everywhere and nowhere: “The time for your work has been granted.”

Hladik wakes. Two soldiers open the door to his cell, march him to a courtyard, and offer him a final cigarette. Their sergeant gives the order to shoot, but the firing squad does not fire and Hladik doesn’t die. Time stops. Everything is frozen: the wind, the sergeant’s arm, the shadow of a bee. Eventually Hladik understands. The year he has been granted will transpire within this frozen moment, “between the order and its execution.” He can finish writing the play, but it will exist only in his mind, and in his memory, in a year folded inside an instant: “He did not work for posterity nor even for God, whose literary preferences he knew little of. Meticulous, still, and in secret, he wove his high, invisible labyrinth in time.”

L. and I both needed to replace the batteries in our phones so she made us an appointment at the Apple Store, which happens to be in a mall called the Forum, which is inside a casino, Caesars Palace, on the Strip. I protested but quickly gave in. After four months here I was curious. We drove down on Sammy Davis Jr. Drive, past the strip clubs and massage parlors and the shooting range where for $2,500 you can crunch a car beneath the treads of an M1A1 Abrams tank. The gleaming, gold slab of the Rhino’s hotel towered over all of it.

It was easy to get lost between the parking structure and the mall and for a while we were stuck in a strange elevator loop that I didn’t think we would escape from but when we finally walked past the last bank of slot machines and through the marble arch that opened onto the tiled floors of the Forum I was too stunned to speak. I barely noticed the colonnades of pink and white marble; the enormous bare-breasted caryatids; the giant, cloud-puffed murals; the painted figures in fake windows opening onto mock terraces above the faux streets through which we plodded, gawking, lugging along bodies that, in all their gratuitous realness, felt suddenly grotesque.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the ceiling. By which I mean the sky magically projected onto it. I had seen photos online, but they had not prepared me for the uncanny sense of spaciousness and depth, the softness of the shifting light and the transmutations of the clouds and the colors, blues sliding slowly across purple into pink edged with gold, closer to a dream of a fantasy of an aurora than to the banal splendors of any actual sunset. Every time I looked up it had changed. The clouds took on new shapes. Day fell into twilight, dawn into day, transfiguring the shade and texture of the light and lending something like grace to the dumb objects in the windows of the shops—the pointy shoes and lacy underpants, handbags and sneakers, sunglasses, watches, suits.

We ducked into the Gap and I felt instantly depressed by the blandness of the light and the unchanging sameness of the garments. When we stepped out again the rotunda outside the Cheesecake Factory had been radically transformed. The screens above the colonnade, which earlier had been displaying gigantic images of fish, as if we were cockroaches gazing up at an aquarium, were bright instead with flames. More flames—I could feel their heat—rose from hidden jets around the fountain at the center of the rotunda. An animatronic sculpture of a dragon was folding its wings and descending slowly out of sight as smoke or steam rose around it.

People had their phones in the air. It was a show, The Fall of Atlantis, repeated every hour on the hour, always the same. We had just caught the end of it, but our phones would not be ready for a while, so I went back later to watch from the beginning. The narrative was simple and, given the fuzzy acoustics, incomprehensible, but I watched it again later on YouTube and figured it out. The actors, crudely mechanized mannequins that rose up on hidden lifts from somewhere beneath the fountain, told the story of a kingdom “destroyed by foolish pride” and torn apart by the greed and ambition of its rulers. The aged king of Atlantis had to choose a successor. His daughter, blond and busty, ruled over water. His son, armored and gripping a flame-spitting sword, presided over fire. They fought. The screens displayed tumbling waves lit orange with flames. One element then the other appeared to triumph. The seas are rising, fires spreading everywhere. Fire won. The screens went gray and then returned to their usual loop, advertising gift cards. “Shop,” they read, “as the Romans do.”

As always, there are wheels within wheels. Recall the vision beheld by the Maya priest in Borges’s “The Writing of the God” of a wheel that was not in front of or behind or beside him, but that was “everywhere at the same time.” Perhaps Borges had read Aurora, in which Boehme describes God as a wheel comprised of seven wheels, each at once creating the others and inside the others, each angled in a different direction and all of them turning at once. It could travel in any direction, Boehme wrote, without ever pausing or turning, and the more a man “beholdeth the wheel, the more he learneth its form or frame; and the more he learneth, the greater longing he hath to the wheel; for he continually seeth somewhat that is more and more wonderful.”

Boehme wrote a lot more about this wondrous “alwaysone wheel” and the seven wheels within it and their correspondence to the Seven Spirits of God and to the stars and the “planetic wheel”—by the contemporary count there were seven planets, the sun and moon plus Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. At times he seemed to suggest that God and the stars, “the wild rough stars,” are one and the same (“if we consider rightly of the sun and stars, with their corpus or body, operations and qualities, then the very divine being may be found therein”). Elsewhere he took pains to insist that they are not, and to warn that you should not make the mistake of worshiping the stars or praying to them. Still elsewhere he confessed that he himself might have sometimes been in error, having caught only “a glimpse of the great God” because “the wheel of nature whirled about too swiftly, so that man, with his halfdead and dull capacity or apprehension, cannot sufficiently comprehend it.”

It occurs to me that all the divisions I’ve drawn up are false, that I’ve been foolish, that the forces that drive the desert, that create and created it—the screaming wind, extremes of heat and cold, the ardors of insects and rodents and birds, the slow growth of fungi, sudden floods, the swirl of stars—are the same ones that drive the city of Las Vegas: the voraciousness with which it builds and destroys, its endless thirst, its fear of the dark and of any brief stillness or vacuity, the hungers of its visitors and of the corporations that run the casinos, of the police who serve them and the people who sleep in the streets, the brightness and beauty of its lights. There was nothing to find here, and nothing lost. I never left the desert. This is it.

We went out for a drink last night, to the Stratosphere. It was Friday and we’d been working hard all week. We got lost in the casino, which was no accident, I suppose. It’s like IKEA without even the pretense of a path: you are not meant to find your way out. Perhaps the pictographs that George Laird used to contemplate on the road through Green Valley were not labyrinths but maps tracing secret routes from the parking structure to the street in all the casinos on the Strip, gifts delivered via vision, dream, or trance, from the people of the past to whatever we are these days. We watched a young Asian woman play roulette with an impressive display of boredom. With each spin she spread another hundred dollars of chips across the table, half on corners, half on numbers, and lost again. L. fed a dollar into a slot machine, tugged the handle, and watched the numbers twirl.

The elevator operator was young and acned and in a far better humor than I would be if I had to spend eight hours a day smiling at strangers in a vertical casket. We shared the elevator with a couple on their honeymoon. They were big people, from Seattle, they said, and some combination of drunk and stoned that caused them to slump against the walls while speaking with great and expectant solemnity about how weird it is to wear your hair up when you’re used to wearing it down. Above the door the floors clicked by until we reached 107. The doors opened. We walked up a short staircase and down a short hallway and there it was, the city extending itself in all directions until it reached the black border of the mountains we knew were there but could not see. Between them and us a great shimmering blanket of light wove itself out of the nothingness, long strands of gold flecked with blue, pink, green, and violet, as beautiful as any sky.

L. gasped. I hadn’t warned her. “Somebody just fell past the window,” she said.

In the first book he wrote after breaking his six-year silence, a book that took him two years to write, Boehme twice mentions an owl. It’s a pretty paragraph. Employing the “powerful, sensuous images” that would so irritate Hegel, he compares the world to a “Bath of Thorns and Thistles” and addresses a hypothetical reader. “Behold,” he writes, “thou poor Soul in thy Bath of Thorns, where is thy Home? Art thou at Home in this World?”

The question is rhetorical. He is talking to himself. The answer is obviously no.

Why, he goes on, don’t you seek esteem in this world? Why not go after riches and honors and pleasure? Everyone else does. Why not makes things easy for yourself? Boehme was my age when he wrote this, forty-four or forty-five. He had been living for years off his friends’ generosity, generally broke and scorned by the authorities, moving from place to place through a landscape torn by war. These questions surely plagued him.

“Why dost thou suffer thyself to be despised and abused by those that are inferior to thee, and know less than thou?” he asks. “Why dost thou make thyself a Fool to the World, and art everyone’s Owl and Footstool?”

It’s a strange usage. In seventeenth-century Lusatia, apparently, or at least in the verdant environs of Boehme’s imagination, the owl did not solely or primarily signify wisdom, misfortune, or death. It was not a messenger or the avatar of a goddess. It was an outcast. It was the bird that every other bird despises, “who one and other will have a Fling and a Pluck at it.”

He says it again a few lines later. Why not do like all the others, he asks himself, and make peace with the hypocrites? “Then thou wouldst be beloved, and no Body would abuse thee; and thou wouldst be more safe and secure in thy Body and Goods, than in this Way, wherein thou art but the World’s Owl and Fool.”

I spent the last few hours, okay, the last few days, fretting, trying to put together the pieces that have been piling up all week: the Rhino’s secretary of defense meeting with his Israeli counterpart and immediately afterward telling Congress that a direct military confrontation between Israel and Iran is “very likely,” the Rhino’s secretary of state flying to Riyadh to touch base with the crown prince before announcing that “Iran destabilizes the entire region,” an Israeli strike on a Syrian base that killed eighteen Iranians, Netanyahu clownishly making the case for war (again) and flying to Moscow tomorrow to meet with Putin, the Rhino expected to pull out—also tomorrow—of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran despite warnings from his own cabinet that such a move would risk world war. It wasn’t hard, really, to put it all together, but it’s hard to know what to do with it.

On the bright side, a new study published this morning predicted that in five billion years, when the sun at last burns through its stores of hydrogen, it will not quietly snuff itself out and fade into the cosmic darkness, as previously believed, but will stretch and swell and finally explode into a gorgeous, glowing ring of plasma. Such planetary nebulae, one of the study’s authors beamed, “are the prettiest objects in the sky.”

Of course, owls are not outcasts or omens or messengers. They’re birds. They see the world as birds do, and we don’t likely figure much in any of it.

The Chemehuevi called Mt. Charleston Nivaganti, which Carobeth Laird translated as “Snow-Having,” though “Snowy” would likely do just as well. They used the name to refer to the entire snowcapped range of the Spring Mountains, which overlook Las Vegas from the west. Until Coyote screwed up and got his brother killed and they ran off together to the north, bringing the Story Time to a decisive close, Coyote and Wolf lived on Nivaganti, in a cave, when the earth was still covered in water. It was from there that Coyote set off after Body Louse in her tiny, flapping, jackrabbit apron, and to there that he dragged the basket filled with all the people of the earth. For the Chemehuevi and the Southern Paiute, Nivaganti was Mount Sinai and Olympus, “the heart of the Storied Land,” a place buzzing with numinous energy, the holiest site in a landscape that had been inhabited once by gods.

It is also on the high, exposed slopes of the Spring Mountains, and not many other places on the planet, that bristlecone pines grow. Bristlecones are the oldest non-cloning organisms on earth: mere adolescents next to grandmother creosote, but ancient all the same. It’s also a good twenty degrees cooler up there than it is in the asphalt plains of Las Vegas, so on Sunday, when the temperature was flirting with one hundred degrees, we drove up into the hills.

The trail began at over eight thousand feet. From there it was a steady, steep climb of almost an hour before we reached them. The bristlecones were on the leeward side of the mountain, unbent by wind, and didn’t look radically different from the other pines and firs that dotted the slopes. Higher up and on the other side, where nothing sheltered them from the violence of the wind, they looked like a different species: thick-trunked but short, with gnarled and twisted branches. Most of the adult trees were probably between one and two thousand years old. One in the White Mountains, to the northwest on the California side of the border, has been dated to more than five thousand years old. Their wood so effectively resists decay that they stay standing for millennia after they’ve died, until the rocks at last erode from beneath their shallow roots.

And so it was up there: the dead trees lay between the living, and stood still tall among them, their trunks smooth and hard and bare of bark. The peak of Mt. Charleston, snow-having into May, was perhaps a mile away. A sheer bluff rose about half that distance to the north. The trees stood, seeking no one’s company, their roots and branches splayed as if to welcome the cold air and unforgiving wind. It didn’t sound at all like the wind in the desert below: not a howl or a shriek but a gentle rush, like the push of water through a stream. The silence between gusts was absolute.

I found a toppled tree and sat. It felt good to touch the trunk and branches, safe somehow, and calming. L. fell asleep with her head on my knees. I watched the clouds blow by overhead. In the valley a raven cawed. Ants crawled over gray rocks spotted with orange lichens. The sun sank and the pines cast crooked shadows over one another’s trunks, mingling like that. Almost all of them would have been standing when the Chemehuevi still gathered here each year. Some were likely already two thousand years old when Rafael Rivera wandered into the basin beneath us to the east, and when the Mormons built a fort there twenty-six years later. Bristlecones grow so slowly that some of their needles, still green, are older than me. Las Vegas is no more venerable than a twig. It is almost certainly more fragile. I could see it down below, a hazy, geometric scuff on the far desert floor. I could even see the Stratosphere, just barely, like a pin half-buried in the sand.

The other day I was reading a pdf of Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, the first two chapters of which summarize the works of Hermes Trismegistus, the mythic figure associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, to whom the varied writings grouped together as the Corpus Hermeticum were for centuries attributed. The god Hermes, whom the Greeks considered identical to Thoth, was like him a mediator between gods and mortals, a guide to the paths that stretch between us and the heavens. Athena may have had the owl, but Hermes/Thoth was the actual messenger, the patron of travelers, thieves, and seekers. In his more ancient form, as Thoth, he was the scribe of the gods—at times depicted with the head of an ibis or the head of a baboon, or with the face of a dog on a baboon’s body. It was Thoth who brought hieroglyphs to humanity, and with them astronomy, medicine, botany, mathematics, gifts of all the many forms of knowledge of the cosmos.

His supposed heir, Hermes Trismegistus, or “Thrice Great Hermes,” was likewise a sort of gateway between divine wisdom and human ignorance, passing on knowledge that had been lost for generations. In The City of God, Augustine wrote that Hermes Trismegistus lived “long before the sages and philosophers of Greece,” only two generations after Moses, and that he was a grandson of the god Hermes and hence a cousin of Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and presented it as a gift to mankind, just as Thoth had given us writing. Things get a little tangled if you let them: According to Hesiod, in retribution for Prometheus’s theft, Zeus dispatched Pandora to mankind and had each god load her with a gift, each gift a curse to be unleashed on mankind. Hermes, the messenger god, grandfather of the thrice great-grandson, contributed untruth: “lies and crafty words,” all the deceptions, manipulations, and ambiguities of which language is capable.

The texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus are a diverse bunch, and not nearly as old as Augustine supposed. They were written in Greek and were likely composed by several different authors living in Egypt in the early centuries of the first millennium. In them theology, cosmology, magic, and the seeds of what we would now call science—astronomy, medicine, botany, mathematics—are inseparably linked and, Frances Yates argued over the course of her career, form a hidden and much-repressed current, a secret lineage that in various ways informed many of the men we recognize as the great minds of the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment: from Bruno, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola to Bacon, Leibniz, and Newton. In other words, the proudest treasure of what we persist in calling Western Civilization, its tradition of empirical and critical reason, was until the eighteenth century in fruitful and more or less constant conversation with esoteric works of Egyptian, gnostic mysticism attributed to the grandson of a trickster god.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of them. In the years that followed, this lineage would be meticulously erased. The strands of thought and belief with which it had fruitfully intersected—Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, Paracelsian alchemy, Neoplatonist philosophy—would be marginalized and mocked. Less than a decade after Newton’s death, the German historian Johann Jakob Brucker published a monumental, and monumentally influential, history of philosophy, the first of its kind, in which he characterized the Hermetic texts—as well as Kabbalah and Neoplatonism—as Philosophia Barbarica. That word again. They were, to Brucker, corrupt, pagan superstitions that stood opposed to the eminently rational history of Christian, European truth-seeking. Many of the entries in Diderot’s Encyclopedia would be cribbed straight from Brucker, whose ideas were smuggled hence into the heart of the French Enlightenment.

This was precisely the same historical moment that the grand narrative of progress, that glorious arc of Reason that had traveled to Paris and London from Athens and Rome, was beginning to take shape. Brucker’s work had been published in Latin by 1744, the Encyclopedia beginning in 1751, Turgot’s “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind” in 1750. Time was just then finding a cozy refuge in the waistcoat pockets of the English bourgeoisie, the earliest coal-powered steam engines were being used to pump the groundwater out of flooded mine shafts, and humans were beginning to transfer the earth’s ancient deposits of carbon up into the planet’s atmosphere. It was also the same moment that, as Martin Bernal documented, the Greeks were being elevated and all traces of Africa erased. Athena scrubbed up nice. She looked great in white marble, and slipped past with little effort. Baboon-faced Thoth didn’t stand a chance. For most of the next two centuries, the texts of the Hermetic corpus would be consigned to the forbidden and derided margins, out there with Lilith and other spirits of the night. To take them seriously got you labeled an occultist, a swindler, or a quack. Like a forgotten continent, the Hermetic corpus would not be rediscovered until the middle of the twentieth century, when Italian historians, and later Frances Yates, began to rescue it from the disrepute into which it had been banished for so long.

In the chapters that I was reading, Yates quoted the original texts, or at least her English translations of Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translations of the Greek originals, which were themselves in conversation with both the Neoplatonist philosophers and far older traditions of Egyptian wisdom literature. In 1463 Ficino had translated the Greek texts into Latin at the urgent request of Cosimo de’ Medici, who had them brought to Florence from the monastery in Macedonia where his agents had discovered them. Cosimo was in a hurry. He already had Ficino working on a translation of the complete works of Plato. Put that aside, he told him, do this one first. Cosimo was old and wanted to read the fabled Hermes Trismegistus before he died. Plato mattered less.

The line that caught me was this one: “Contemplate through me . . . the world, and consider its beauty. See the hierarchy of the seven heavens and their order. See that all things are full of fight.” That last idea got me, not only for the delightful inelegance of its expression—five-year-olds are “full of fight,” and boastful drunks—but for the notion behind it, which we have seen also in Boehme, that the cosmic order in all its intricate beauty teems nonetheless with strife. (Whether or not he had the opportunity to read the texts directly, Boehme was certainly exposed to Hermetic thought by way of Paracelsus.) But Yates didn’t use quotation marks and it wasn’t clear if her citations were exact or if she was paraphrasing, so I looked up the original text online. Or at least a modern English translation of what we assume to be the original, which was surely copied and recopied many times before it fell into the hands of Cosimo de’ Medici’s scouts. Yates was quoting, it turned out, but she left out a lot and elided the ellipses. The scanner that digitized her book had apparently mistaken an l for an f. “All things are full of light,” it should have read. To be sure, I went to the library later and checked the pdf against a hard copy. Yep. Light, it said. Not fight.

Still, fight seems more correct. Even in this long chain of transmissions and translations over the centuries from language to language and form to form, words tangle, wrestle, fight. Thoth gave us writing and truth. Hermes gave us misunderstanding and lies. The Greeks understood them to be a single god. I kept searching, reading, scouring the internet, and came across a blog post by a Dutch scholar named Wouter Hanegraaff, in which he revealed that the most widely distributed version of Ficino’s translation of the Hermetic text the Pimander—the Treviso edition of 1471, which spread throughout Europe and was used as a basis for later editions and other translations—was unauthorized, and hastily and shoddily produced, and introduced so many errors into Ficino’s text that much of it was rendered essentially unreadable. What passed for sacred mystery was merely garbled nonsense. If anyone noticed they didn’t complain. The text’s influence was enormous.

L. flies off tomorrow, which means I have only one week before the fellowship ends and I leave Las Vegas too. I can’t pretend I’m sad about that, but I will miss the desert. And of course, I’ll miss L. We’ll only be apart for a month before I join her again, far from the Mojave, but the usual pre-parting depression has already settled on my shoulders, and the generalized anxiety of being far apart when everything feels so uncertain. On Sunday, the Rhino suggested that if he doesn’t get his wall, he may “have to think about closing up the country for a while.” L. is not a U.S. citizen. The Rhino did not elaborate or explain what he meant, but he said it again. Like an Alzheimer’s patient, or like a man accustomed to the feeling of reality slipping away, he tends to say things twice: “We may have to close up our country to get this straight, because we either have a country or we don’t.” So true. It’s more than likely that he meant nothing by it and had not considered his words before speaking, but there is no way to know which blusterous absurdity will get caught like a burr in the raging vacuity of his mind, or to guess what’s coming next.

Last night the sky was clear so after dinner we did what I had been meaning to do for months. We got in the car and headed out of the city with no destination but darkness. I drove north on the interstate, turned off on Highway 93, and kept going, past a gypsum mine and two power plants until Las Vegas was barely a yellow blur on the horizon. I pulled over and turned off the engine. The crickets screamed. When I opened the door the sky made me dizzy. That was the idea. There was no moon and the darkness was sufficiently absolute that it revealed itself as something more than a uniform blackness, something with volume, layers, depth. I laid a towel over the hood and we shimmied up and made ourselves as comfortable as we could while we waited for our eyes to adjust.

In the two weeks since we camped in Utah—the last time we were able to see the stars—Orion had set and Taurus had disappeared beneath the horizon. After half an hour we had sufficiently oriented ourselves that we could turn in place and identify the constellations all the way around from Corvus to Virgo to Hydra to Leo to Canis Minor to Gemini to Auriga to Perseus to Cassiopeia to Cepheus to Polaris and the Little Dipper to Draco and a corner of Cygnus to Hercules to the Corona Borealis to Boötes. The Dipper was almost straight overhead. We could make out the paws of Ursa Major, and its snout. “It looks more like an anteater than a bear,” L. observed. “It looks exactly like an anteater.”

Eventually my eyes and brain got tired. The tenuous order of the constellations was too much to hold on to and I let the sky blur again to a chaos of pinprick lights, bright and dim, near and far, yellow, red, and blue. A shooting star streaked close to the horizon, and after a few minutes another one. I made my wishes. In the hour we had been sitting there the sky had already shifted. I squeezed L.’s hand, happy to be reminded of the expanses between stars, the vastness of even the dimmest lights above us, to remember that the sliver of the spectrum that our eyes are capable of seeing catches only a small and paltry portion of the energy coursing through the universe, that if we could also see the microwaves and radio waves and gamma waves and infrared and ultraviolet light leaping between and within the galaxies, the dark emptiness of space would seem neither empty nor dark, but teeming.

It was almost eleven when we got back in the car and headed south, to the freeway, and to Las Vegas, oozing brightly across the desert floor. “Like radioactive algae,” L. said, which was exactly right. Soon we could make out the Strip and even the Stratosphere, which, from this distance, L. observed, looked just like a middle finger.

Perhaps old triple-great Hermes never really went away. Was not the very idea of progress also dependent on the conviction, shouted throughout the Hermetic corpus, that heaven is here for the taking and that humans, despite our mortal bodies, are in essence godly, capable of understanding all that exists, and even of sharing in the creative powers of the divine? “Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God,” the Hermetic texts advised, and then explained just how to do it: “Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God.” If that wasn’t easy enough, the text went on: “Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being.”

This, even long after Hermes’s banishment, would remain the creed underlying so much of modern scientific endeavor, that all things could be known and all of nature mastered, that man, or at least some civilized subset of mankind, was marching on a path toward perfection. He—and until very recently, it was always only he—could understand the behavior of the farthest stars, the nuclei of cells and the viscera of atoms, the nature of tortoises and finches, and also of the unfortunate savages who could not walk this path themselves.

Could it be, then, that we owe our understanding of time—dull time, that we wear like a leash, the time that’s always running out, that drags us toward the grave and that we yet never have enough of, empty, fragmented, insulting, oppressive, insufferable time, blinking away on our iPhones, measurable on a management consultant’s spreadsheet—not just to ancient wounds and the demands of capital and conquest, but also to the undimmed ecstasies of two-thousand-year-old Egyptian gnostics convinced that “Eternity is the Power of God,” that nothing ever begins or ends, and that, in Yates’s paraphrasing, “in this divine and living world, nothing can die and everything moves”? Can even time in all its vastness contain such contradictions? Where, in the substance of a moment, would they fit?

The Rhino withdrew from the Iran deal. Time is spiraling again. One hour after he announced that the United States would no longer honor the deal Obama and the EU had struck with Iran, Syrian media reported that four Israeli missiles had been fired at an Iranian military compound on a Syrian army base south of Damascus, killing more than a dozen soldiers. At least half of them were members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

All of this, and L.’s departure, and my own next week, was on my mind last night. I was already sleeping poorly, or not at all, when the woman on the foam mat began shouting. She continued on and off all night, arguing bitterly with some absent interlocutor, cursing him or her or all of us, falling silent for a while then picking it up again.

Perhaps we can now begin to make sense of Walter Benjamin’s conviction that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption, that what he called the “time of now” is “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” (Kenneth Rexroth used the same word: “scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.”) If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there.

Right here, in other words.

For Benjamin this could only be a political act. It meant rejecting any structures that relied on the exploitation of labor—which is to say not only our muscles and our skills but our time, being as it pulses through our veins—or on the “mastery of nature,” which was, he suggested, of a piece with the exploitation of human beings. And it meant rejecting the ideology of progress, the slumberous fantasy that history will carry us to some better land. It would not. Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call “civilization,” history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be “blasted out” and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us.

This was not, for Benjamin, a choice. It wasn’t that redemption lay behind some distant gate at the end of a path that we could choose not to walk, that there were other, smoother and easier roads that we might take with less effort, on which we might nonetheless survive. Then, as now, the only other way led to extinction. Benjamin wrote the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” early in 1940, in the months following his release from a French internment camp in an empty château near the city of Nevers. The war had already begun.

In June of that year, German troops entered Paris. Benjamin fled first to Limoges and then to Marseilles. He left a handwritten copy of the “Theses” there with his friend Hannah Arendt, another German Jewish philosopher who was, like him, hoping to secure passage to the United States by way of Portugal. That September, Benjamin made it as far as the small seaside town of Portbou, on the Spanish side of the border with France. Informed by the local police that he would be delivered the next morning to the French authorities—and thence, almost certainly, to the Gestapo—Benjamin, ill and exhausted, despaired. Alone in his hotel room, he swallowed an overdose of morphine tablets. His body still lies in Portbou, in a cemetery high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Arendt made it out. She and her husband were allowed to leave France and travel through Spain into Portugal, where they spent three months stranded in Lisbon. They passed the hours reading Benjamin’s words aloud to one another, and to the small group of refugees who had gathered there, waiting to sail to safety, on the edge of a crumbling world.

Walter Benjamin, it turns out, wrote occasionally for a German magazine called Uhu, which means owl. In middle age, at least, with his dark, intense eyes, round glasses, and unruly hair, he looked a little like one.

It cooled off. The wind is blowing again tonight, bending the bamboo along the fence. With the door open I can hear it from my bed. The wind feels like a message, a reminder that other places exist, and other times. I dropped L. at the airport the other day. With her here the city lost a little of its edge. For a while I could ignore its crackling despair. I could laugh at it, at least. Earlier I walked over to Fremont Street to meet people from the Institute for a goodbye drink. On my way there I passed a construction site on Carson. In the months that I’ve been here, a half block of condos have gone up. I don’t know what was there before, but the apartments are finished now. There’s still a fence around the site, and a tattered black plastic tarp affixed to the top of the fence. I had never paid any attention to it before, but every few seconds as I was coming and going the wind picked up the tarp, filling it, making it billow like a torn black sail, a chorus of ghosts, shivering. I had to dodge it as I walked past on the sidewalk.

There’s a cricket inside the apartment and I can hear it in here too. It’s under the bed, I think, singing, seeking a mate or just keeping itself company, telling the night and its fellow crickets tales of this strange and inhospitable land into which it has somehow wandered. And here I am, propped up on the pillows, singing back.

At about midnight last night, twenty missiles were fired at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights. None struck their targets, or caused any casualties, or even successfully landed in the Golan. Israel immediately claimed that the rockets were Iranian and within three hours launched a massive assault on Iranian military targets in Syria. According to the Russian defense ministry, twenty-eight Israeli planes crossed into Syrian airspace, firing more than seventy missiles and killing at least twenty-three people. Russia, which controls the most sophisticated air defense system in Syria, took no steps to intervene. This morning the Israeli defense minister claimed that “nearly all the Iranian infrastructure in Syria” had been destroyed. “I hope we’ve finished this episode,” he said.

On both counts, he was almost certainly too optimistic.

Another round of goodbye drinks last night. This time with T.—the other fellow, who had been gone on book tour for most of the term—and M. and D., who work at the Institute. Piecing together what happened is like reconstructing a dream. The pieces don’t fit, or they keep slipping away, or seem so improbable that they must have belonged to someone else’s dream. It was T.’s idea that we could all go bowling at an alley on the Strip, but it turned out that Anthrax was playing and the bowling alley was closed. Or maybe it was open but you had to buy an Anthrax ticket if you wanted to bowl, so we had dinner instead at a Mexican restaurant overlooking a sea of people shuffling through an outdoor mall and then I think the goal was to play bingo in one of the casinos, but we couldn’t figure out where to play it or if it could be played at all, so T. shepherded us along the Strip to see the volcano show at the Mirage. After that we could see the dancing fountains at the Bellagio. T. had seen them several times before. The fountains, she promised, would be amazing.

Mainly I remember the crowds on the sidewalks, packed so close that staying together while walking forward took constant focus and effort. All those bodies, strapped into wheelchairs or swathed in shorts or tight-fitting dresses or bikinis and bunny ears, all of us so grotesquely, densely mortal beneath the infinite promise of the neon lights. We passed a man lying barefoot and unconscious, bleeding all over the concrete from a gash in his foot. Like everyone else, we stopped, wondered if we should do something, walked on. The Falun Gong people were out in force with banners and amplifiers broadcasting something about organ theft in Chinese prisons. A truck kept circling on Las Vegas Boulevard towing a mobile billboard with giant photos of nearly naked blond women and the words CALL 24 HOURS GIRLS DIRECT TO YOU. Outside the moat surrounding the Mirage protesters waved signs reading: LIFE IN A BATHTUB IS NO LIFE AT ALL, and MIRAGE DOLPHINS HAVE NO SHADE. I didn’t see the dolphins but right on schedule the fake mountain on the far side of the moat erupted in great jets of flame. Spurting fountains transformed water into foaming lava with the help of orange lights. Hillary Clinton’s voice crackled out of the Falun Gong speakers behind me. She was speaking sternly about human rights violations in China. Above the volcano towered the hotel, its top floors covered with an enormous ad for the Mirage’s Cirque du Soleil franchise, a single word: LOVE.

We followed T. like ducklings. At some point we drifted into the Venetian but all I remember are long colonnades and the gondolas in the canals between the casino and the street and M., beside me, saying, “This is all Sheldon Adelson’s,” while I wondered what it’s like to come here and land a job as a gondolier and pole tourists around the shallow fountains for eight hours and go home to your roommates, get stoned, and watch TV. T. led us farther down or maybe up the Strip toward the Bellagio. Space seemed to have bent. We had veered off the sidewalk and streamed along like so many minnows through the sparkling lobbies of casino after casino until I had no idea where we were or how far we had come. We got there just in time to hear a few lonely, maudlin country chords blasting through the speakers as the fountains began to leap, hundreds of them all at once shooting thousands or tens of thousands of gallons of water higher in the air than seemed possible, the jets leaping in synch with the music, Lee Greenwood suddenly crooning, “ ’Cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away . . .”

The water rose and the water fell, arcing and twisting, lit a gleaming white against the dark, still pool beneath us. M. and D. had wandered off somewhere. Lee Greenwood croaked on: “And I’m proud to be American where at least I know I’m free . . .” I stood beside T. and watched the fountains all spurting up together as the song approached a climax that seemed to never end.

T. shook her head, her eyes wide in awe and horror. “I swear,” she said, “last time it was Elton John.”

The Hermetic corpus also contains a prophecy. In the text known as “The Lament,” Hermes Trismegistus addresses his pupil Asclepius and predicts that one day the gods will abandon Egypt. Foreigners will invade the land and forbid the ancient ways of worship. “O Egypt, Egypt,” he proclaims, “nothing will survive save words engraved on stones.”

Deprived of all routes to the sacred and “weary of life, men will no longer regard the world as worthy object of their admiration and reverence.” All of creation will only be a burden to them, “and thenceforward they will despise and no longer cherish the whole of the universe, incomparable work of God.” Then “darkness will be preferred to light . . . the pious man will be thought mad, the impious, wise; the frenzied will be thought brave, the worst criminal a good man.”

Perhaps this sounds familiar. It will get worse: “Then the earth will lose its equilibrium, the sea will no longer be navigable, the heaven will no longer be full of stars, the stars will stop their courses in the heaven. Every divine voice will be silenced, and all be silent . . . Such will be the old age of the world.”

This passage was read by ancient Christian authors, not without some schadenfreude, as a prophesy of the defeat of paganism, written perhaps in the fourth century A.D., after the Christianization of Egypt—a process that was by no means gentle—had already commenced. But the text is almost certainly older than that, and makes no reference at all to Christianity. Apocalyptic literature, as Anathea Portier Young and other biblical scholars have argued, is a form of resistance literature, a coded attempt to envisage some outside in a political present that has become unbearable, even if it means the death of the known world. “The Lament” more likely reflects the anxieties of Egyptians living centuries earlier, under Ptolemaic rule, fearful that the dominant Hellenistic culture would entirely displace the more venerable, indigenous religion. Read backward from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it appears also to be prophesying, with astonishing foresight, the banishment, by eighteenth-century Europeans, of the Hermetic tradition itself, and of nearly all extra-European and vitalistic perspectives on existence until we are left with a dead, mechanical husk of a world, haunted by the occasional Lilith. Like all good prophesies, it is at once vague enough and specific enough that it might apply to almost any era. Giordano Bruno, in the late sixteenth century, was certain it applied to his. Might it not also be talking about us, these rising seas and smoke-clogged skies, the bullets raining down from the casinos, the elevation of the very worst citizen to the highest seat in the land?

It doesn’t end there. “When all these things have come to pass,” the Lament continues, God “will annihilate all malice.” He’ll do it the old-fashioned way, with flood or fire or disease. “Then he will bring back the world to its first beauty, so that this world may again be worthy of reverence and admiration . . . That’s what the rebirth of the world will be; a renewal of all good things, a holy and most solemn restoration of Nature herself, imposed by force in the course of time.”

You may find this hard to believe, but I haven’t mentioned even half the owls I’ve seen. Once you start noticing something, you see it everywhere. I see them on T-shirts, on throw pillows, in framed pastel prints on waiting room walls, on the internet and on TV screens, big-eyed owls hawking allergy pills and travel apps. I see them tattooed on people’s bodies all the time. I try not to stare. There’s one on a billboard I drive past almost every day, selling insurance or mufflers or chicken wings. There are plastic ones on rooftops all over this town, intended to scare off all actual birds but usually smeared with white streaks of shit, an advertisement for the intelligence of pigeons.

Nothing means what we want it to, or never just that. Nothing stays put. Owls are messengers, sure, and they are the actual message. They announce death and war and maybe also wisdom, and all the repressed chaos of the ages, everything that we thought was dead but that’s coming back hard and biting at our asses as we try to get through the days with just a little dignity. Marija Gimbutas would say that if they foretell death or disaster they herald rebirth too, but do they? Or is it all just an endless chain of linkages and connections, nothing ever really dying, a web that spreads on and on, ensnaring everything in its sticky, woven strands?

It’s a lot to take in at once, this web, and in our dizziness and fear that its limitlessness adds up to meaninglessness we can’t help but hack a story out of it, following a single path from node to node and ignoring and excluding all the other links. That’s what we do. That’s what I’ve done. But the stories that have been winning out these last two-hundred-and-change years—that have been erasing all the other possibilities, the other choices that we had—they have led us here, to this particular regime of power and to this too-warm abyss, to these fires and floods and the Rhino pacing on the stage, and to another moment of choice. If we are to survive we will have to remember, if we can, that there are always other paths, and that this regime can be dismantled just as it was built. And that beyond any individual route or routes, there is the map itself, this sprawling connectedness without terminus or border. It tells a different kind of story, and presents a different kind of choice.

Louis Auguste Blanqui was sixty-six years old and imprisoned in the dungeon of the Château du Taureau when he began, in 1871, to write the book that he would title Eternity by the Stars. “The universe is infinite in time and space, eternal, boundless and undivided,” Blanqui wrote in the book’s opening sentence, an extraordinary start for a man whose literary output had hitherto been composed of furious manifestos, pamphlets, and proclamations. Of all the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, none was as intransigent, determined, and austere in his wrath as Blanqui. The bourgeoisie, the church, and all the institutions of the French state had no enemy more ferocious and committed. His sole faith was in the dynamic and transformative force of revolution. To Blanqui modern Europe was not a glorious and ascendant civilization, but the heir to centuries of oppression, hypocrisy, and corruption. “Let us destroy the old society,” he wrote, “we shall find the new one beneath the ruins.”

Blanqui would devote the entirety of his adult life to that attempt, taking part in four unsuccessful revolutions and countless other plots, enduring defeat after defeat with a feverish, ascetic rigor. At twenty-two, in the spring of 1827, he was beaten nearly to death at a demonstration and, undiscouraged, was shot in the throat at another protest that fall. He was arrested for the first time the following year, and in the decades that followed would be sentenced more than nine times, once to exile, twice to death, twice to life in prison. All told he would spend nearly thirty-three years in jail.

His confinement in 1871 must have been among the most painful of the lot. On March 18 of that year, one day after his arrest, the workers of Paris rose up and seized the city, forcing the army and the government to flee to Versailles. By March 28, the Commune had been declared and Blanqui elected its president in absentia. The Communards offered to release all of their prisoners—whose number included generals, a senator, and the archbishop of Paris—in exchange for Blanqui’s freedom. The government refused. (Walter Benjamin later blamed Germany’s Social Democrats for having “almost entirely” erased Blanqui’s name from history, “though at the sound of that name the preceding century had quaked.”) Blanqui would miss the most radical experiment in working-class democracy of the century, the revolution he had been fighting for all his life. Perhaps, with his leadership, it would have turned out differently, but ten weeks later it was over. By the end of May, the army had reoccupied Paris, arrested more than forty thousand Communards, and executed a still-unknown number—estimates range from just under seven thousand to more than twenty thousand—shooting them in the streets and in the barracks, burying them in mass graves beneath the parks and squares.

Blanqui spent those months locked in the Château de Taureau, the Castle of the Bull, a fortress of stone built on a rocky island at the mouth of the Bay of Morlaix, off the coast of Brittany. With its sheer walls rising from the water on a naked lump of rock, it would make Alcatraz look welcoming. Blanqui was the fort’s sole inmate. His guards are said to have had orders to shoot him if they saw him approach the window to his cell. But sitting or lying on the damp, stone floor beneath the low, vaulted ceiling of his cell, knowing that all was once again lost and that most of his comrades had been killed, he would have been able, at least, to see the stars in the sky above, reeling free in the blackness. Out there in the middle of the bay, far from the smoke and haze of factories and cities, they must have been spectacularly bright. Certainly Blanqui could not avoid hearing the relentless crashing of the waves, and feeling in his bones the repetition of the tides.

Robbed of any form of human solidarity, Blanqui wrote about the stars. He considered the brevity of even their existence: “What are those billions of suns that succeed each other throughout time and space? A deluge of sparkles. This rain fertilizes the universe.” Looking up, night after night, he had no doubt that he was gazing into an eternity bounded only by the limits of his own senses. “The enigma of the universe is constantly before our thoughts,” he wrote. “The human spirit wants to decipher it at all costs.” He threw himself into the task with the same ruthless determination that had spurred him all his life. He regarded his approach as strictly logical and scientific. (“The universe lies before us, open to observation and to reason.”) Yet he began the text of Eternity by the Stars with a notion that he attributed to Pascal, though his own version of it was closer to that of the martyred Hermetic magus Giordano Bruno: that the universe can be best conceived of as a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere.

The key paradox that Blanqui set out to untangle was that despite the manifest infinity of the cosmos, all matter is composed of a finite number of elements, or “simple bodies,” as he called them. Only sixty-four had yet been identified, from hydrogen to cerium, but Blanqui allowed that the knowledge of his day was incomplete and that there could be as many as one hundred. The periodic table now goes up to 118, but even if there were ten thousand elements, they could only be joined in a finite number of combinations and the problem would remain: How to reconcile the finite quantity of material building blocks with the infinite expanse of creation? “Let us not ask: where shall we find enough room for so many worlds?” he wrote. “Instead, let’s ask: where shall we find enough worlds for all this room?”

His solution was a dizzying one: The combinations must repeat, and they must repeat infinitely. Everything that exists exists in endless iterations: this galaxy, this solar system, this planet, the chair or bench or sofa on which you’re sitting, the room in which you’re reading this, the ache in your back, the itch on your nose, you yourself, in this instant and every other one, everything everywhere a hall of mirrors with no end. There is not just this one familiar world, but an infinity of “brother-worlds,” some of them identical to this one except for the swing of an individual electron, a breeze that blows here but not there, a drop of rain that didn’t fall, a thought you didn’t allow yourself to think. There you kissed someone you were too afraid to even talk to here. Somewhere else you blew a stop sign, held your tongue, had one too many drinks. Every choice we make and don’t make spawns a fresh new world, and somewhere else in the cosmos, too far for our telescopes to find it, spins another planet on which we took the other path. A planet on which you didn’t say the words you’ve always wished you could take back, on which you didn’t leave her, on which they didn’t find you sleeping and arrest you in your bed. And each of those worlds and every other one exists not once or a dozen times, but in infinite repetitions. “Wherever it may be,” Blanqui wrote, “the road that must bring the existence of our very planet to completion has already been traveled billions of times. The road is nothing but a copy printed in advance by the centuries.”

Blanqui’s favored metaphor figured this world too as writing, and nature as a book printed in an infinite edition. “There are—strictly speaking—no originals,” he warned, since this universe has neither beginning nor end, but if only heuristically, or because the textual analogy held such appeal, he nonetheless described the universe as “divided between originals and copies,” describing the latter also as “proofs,” as if God were a printer setting “type combinations” in every possible array. As if the cosmos were an immense printshop. Or a library, like one described by Borges, who, despite their antithetical political outlooks, was fascinated by the man he called “the communist Blanqui,” and dropped references to him, only some of them cloaked, in several of his stories and essays. Walter Benjamin was also obsessed with Blanqui, but he read him badly, missing the forlorn, infernal optimism of the insurrectionist’s vision. He wrote with a masochistic fascination only of “the terrifying features” of Blanqui’s imagined multiverse, concluding, “Humanity figures there as damned.”

To be sure, the prisoner’s vision of this quantitative eternity—worlds piling up in isolation from one another, condemned to repeat themselves without awareness or improvement—was a lonely one, a bad trip that tastes of madness. Blanqui might call them brothers but there could be no fraternity among the planets. Our endless doubles and all the armies of close approximations of ourselves could not help us, nor could we advise them of the paths they must not take. “That is the terrible part!” he wrote. “No one can warn anyone else.”

Still, there is a freedom here, and solace of a sort. “Let us not be alarmed at those globes pouring out of the quill by the billions,” wrote Blanqui, in his cell, a quill clutched between his fingers. His was a vision of absolute equality, in which no hierarchy, spatial or temporal, could begin to make sense. No world or sun is more central than any other. No power lasts. All domination is local and fleeting, laid low by the breadth of the infinite. All of us, “we are part of the copy.” None of this makes us any less free: “All mankind, identical at the time of hatching, follow, each on their own planet, the road laid out by the passions, and each individual’s particular influence contributes to designing that road.”

Time collapses here. It can have no linear reach. Everything that might ever happen has already happened, and will again, forever. What is left to fear? The concept of progress becomes a very silly joke. Any possible advancement is “locked up on each earth and disappears with it.” Instead, “always and everywhere, on the terrestrial camp, the same drama, the same set, on the same narrow stage, a noisy humanity, infatuated by its own greatness, thinking itself to be the universe and inhabiting its prison like an immensity, only to drown soon along with the globe.”

Eternity by the Stars was published on February 20, 1872, a century before my birth. By then the U.K.’s carbon dioxide emissions had already risen by a factor of more than ten thousand. Blanqui wrote to his sister a month before the book’s publication, asking her to see to it that copies be made available not only to the press but to the members of the National Assembly and of the tribunal that would judge him at Versailles. It would have been an unusual defense. He didn’t get a chance to make it. Three days before its publication, the tribunal sentenced Blanqui to be exiled. If his health had not been destroyed by his confinement, he would likely have been transported to the South Pacific penal colony of New Caledonia along with nearly four thousand Communards. Instead, his sentence was commuted, and he was condemned once again to life in prison. He was released nonetheless in 1879 and returned immediately to the struggle, traveling throughout France to demand amnesty for all surviving Communards. He did not write about the stars again, nor of the infinity of worlds. He died two years later, on New Year’s Day, of a stroke, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where the bodies of more than one thousand of his fellow revolutionaries had been dumped in a mass grave while he was locked in the Château du Taureau. He would have found comfort in their company.

In this world, that’s how it ended. For Blanqui, at least. Theoretical physicists have since envisaged the cosmos in terms not so different from his, as a patchwork multiverse containing all possible worlds infinitely repeated. If they’re right, and if Blanqui was right, then among all those worlds surely there is one—there must be—in which humans have, at the brink of the abyss, stepped back and learned to live inside of time, and to hold each other there. To hold tight to everything outside of us, and everything within, to everything above and below. Perhaps it’s not this world. But perhaps it is.

Tomorrow I leave Las Vegas. I don’t know if it’s a hangover from too much proximity to the destructive energies of the Great American Id last night, or if I’m just sick of moving, but all day the city has felt diffused with sadness. Not its usual bright and brutal buzz but something gentler and simply mournful. I spent most of the day cleaning and packing up the apartment, folding clothes, laying aside a box of food, toiletries, clothing for the woman on the mat. Late in the afternoon I had to drive to campus and then across town to run an errand in the southwestern corner of the city. By then the light was soft and the sun low above the mountains. I was way out in the construction zone, on the edge of town where you can watch the city eat the desert. New subdivisions were going up on both sides of the highway, the houses still plywood skeletons, the roads already planted with paloverdes and desert willows, all of them in blossom, yellow and pink. Heading home, I drove through Summerlin, not far from Red Rock Canyon. Petroglyph motifs were pressed into the concrete highway overpasses, bighorn sheep, lizards, and strange, humanoid silhouettes, the mountains looking on from the west with bored and patient dignity. I rounded the bend and merged onto another freeway and once again the city was laid out beneath me. Not yet that golden web—it was light still—but I could see the entire basin, downtown, the Stratosphere, the Strip, the mountains striped with the shifting shadows of the clouds. It didn’t look apocalyptic or damned, just sad, and silly, like a joke that might have worked but had been told badly and had only made everyone feel more alone.

On my last morning in Las Vegas I woke to the news that thirty-seven Palestinian protesters had been shot to death in Gaza while the Rhino’s new embassy opened in Jerusalem. Ivanka was smiling like a game show host in all the photos, gleaming with smugness and wealth. Sheldon Adelson was there too, glowing with a different sort of light. Less than fifty miles away, in Gaza, near Khan Younis, tens of thousands demonstrated, marching to the fence that imprisoned them, knowing that Israeli snipers would not hesitate to shoot, that in the previous five weeks dozens had already been killed, and thousands injured. By the end of the day sixty-two were dead, eight of them children, and more than twenty-seven hundred wounded. The hospitals in Gaza were overwhelmed by the injured. I saw photos on Twitter of the floors smeared with blood.

I threw myself into packing and cleaning, loaded the car, and gave the apartment a final sweep. Waze claimed there was an accident on the interstate, so instead of heading back the way I had come, I drove straight down Highway 95. It paralleled the Colorado River and passed through the Chemehuevi Valley within a few miles of the reservations assigned to the Mohave and the Chemehuevi, and not far from Parker, Arizona, where George Laird worked as a blacksmith until Carobeth Harrington walked into his shop and redirected the trajectory of his days. I cut over on Highway 62 and about one hundred miles east of Joshua Tree passed a stand of tamarisk trees blooming a bright and disconcerting pink. They’re imports, or invaders, if you prefer to think that way, originally from North Africa and the Middle East. Tamarisks are mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Bible, and the Koran. When Set, the Egyptian god of the desert, killed his brother Osiris, hid his body in a chest, and tossed the chest into the Nile, it washed up across the sea and a tamarisk grew around it. Eventually Isis, Osiris’s wife and sister, found it and, after more travails and some help from Thoth, brought Osiris back to life. I didn’t know about the flowers, that they were such a shocking pink.

Already on that highway Las Vegas felt like a dream, fleeing from my memory, growing fuzzier and more unreal with every passing mile of creosote basin rimmed by jagged hills. Will what we call civilization go like that too, a brutal, gleaming, plasticized absurdity that we will recall less with nostalgia than with befuddlement and wonder that a whole species could consent to live that way? There are other ways. It’s not too late to find them. One way or another, we will have to.

I arrived at my friends’ house in time for dinner. They drove off to L.A. after we ate and I moved a chair into the driveway and sat outside to watch the sun set. The jackrabbits hopped past me, a few feet away, pausing to scratch themselves and nibble the flowers off a senna bush. There were no clouds, so the sunset wasn’t the operatic, god-lit sort that you see in the winter and fall. The sky just slowly changed color, from blue through several shades of yellow to orange and other colors that I cannot name to a darker blue at last, and then to darkness. Venus blinked on as soon as the sun was gone and for a while it was the only light in the sky. The birds went quiet and the bats came out, diving above the creosote. I stayed there until the stars appeared. It took a while. Jupiter showed in the east, chasing Venus across the ecliptic. It seemed like a long time that the rest of the sky stayed blank, a flat blue unbroken except for those two smeary planets until finally Castor and Pollux appeared above the western horizon and then not one by one but all at once they came.