I

June, 1923: The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on muleback in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of Peking. He saw it from a distance: the Ordos, the inner Mongolian desert. He saw from the mule what he had seen often in Egypt years before, “the burnt stones of the desert and the sand of the dunes in the dusk.”

The Ordos is a desert plateau 3,000 feet high, from which mountains rise. It spreads 35,000 square miles. The Great Wall separates the Ordos from the fertile lands to the east and south in Shansi and Shensi provinces.

He was forty-two years old, tall and narrow, fine-featured. He wore a big felt hat like a cowboy, and thick boots. Rough weather had cut lines on his face. He had carried stretchers during the Great War for a regiment of sharpshooters. His courage at the front—at Ypres, Arras and Verdun—won him several medals, which the surviving men of his regiment requested for him. One of his fellows recalled his “absolute contempt for danger” as he mounted parapets under fire. People shortened his name—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—to Teilhard: “Tay-yard” in French.

His characteristic expression was simple and natural, according to one colleague, who also noted “his eyes, filled with intelligence and understanding.” Another scientist described him as “a man of self-effacing and irresistible distinction, as simple in his gestures as in his manners … his smile never quite turned to laughter … anxious to welcome, but like a rock of marble.” From the back of a jog-trotting mule, he could spot on stony ground a tiny rock that early man had chipped.

On some days in the Ordos he and his geologist colleague dug, excavated and sifted the ground. On other days they moved in caravan. They rode with two Mongolian soldiers—to fight bandits—and five so-called donkey boys. “On the third day,” he wrote a friend, “we arrived at an immense steppe over which we traveled for more than six days without seeing much else but endless expanses of tall grasses.” He passed the garnet and marble gorges of the Ula-Shan, “the old crystalline shelf of China.”

July, 1923: Teilhard was one of the men who unpacked the expedition’s three donkeys and ten mules for the night. Bandit raids had routed them from the steppes and forced them to enter the badlands. That night he and the others pitched their two white tents in the Ordos massif, within a circle of red earth cliffs. In one red cliff he found, by daylight, the fossil remains of extinct pachyderms from the Pliocene.

“The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world,” he wrote, “are only an illusion.”

The scant rain that reaches the Ordos falls in thunderstorms. During a thunderstorm, the man wrote a letter. “Of this part of the journey, the crossing of the Arbous-Ula will remain in my memory as the finest stage. The innumerable strata of this savage mountain, a forward bastion of the Ula-Shan on the right bank of the Yellow River, bend gently into two long concentric folds which seem to unfurl over the eastern solitudes.”

August, 1923: Once more they pitched their tents in the desert in a circle of cliffs. Here they camped for a month, in the southeast corner of the Ordos where the cliffs were gray, yellow and green. Here the great eroded loess hills met the sands a river laid—the river called Shara-Osso-Gol. And here they found the world’s first evidence of pre-Neandertal man in China. The man of the yellow earths, Teilhard named him, for loess is a fine yellow dust. They found his traces in the Shara-Osso-Gol’s twisted canyon.

First they found Neandertal tools ten meters down: scrapers, gravers, quartzite blades. Then they dug through 164 feet of barren sands before they found an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked. People had lived in China long before Neandertal people lived in Europe. Their blackened hearth made a thin layer among cross-bedded dune sands and blue clays, near the river. No hominid bones were there, but some tools lay about, and the hearth was indisputable—the first human traces north of the Himalayas.

The people made these fires by this river about 450,000 years ago—before the last two ice ages. During their time, the Outer Mongolian plateau to the north continued its slow rise; it was blocking Indian Ocean monsoons. The northern plateau dried to dust and formed the Gobi Desert. The people would have seen dust clouds blow from the north, probably only a few big dust clouds every year. Such dust today! they must have thought. After the people vanished, the dust continued to blow down on their land; it laid loess deposits hundreds of feet deep. Almost 4,500 centuries passed, and in 1222 Genghis Khan and his hordes rode ponies over the loess plateau, over the hundreds of feet of loess deposits yellow and gray, over the fecund dust and the barren sand, and over the animal bones, the chipped blades and the hearth. Teilhard thought of this, of Genghis Khan and the ponies. “Much later,” he wrote, “Genghis Khan crossed this plain in all the pride of his victories.” At that time the Mongols made stirrups and horseshoes from wild sheep horns.

Teilhard found a twentieth-century Mongol family living in the Shara-Osso-Gol canyon. Their name was Wanschock. Wanschock and his five sons helped him excavate during the weeks he camped. They rode horses, kept goats and lived in a cave scooped out of a cliff in the loess. They taught their toddlers to ride by mounting them on sheep. “The Mongols wear long hair,” Teilhard wrote, and they “never take off their boots, are never out of the saddle. The Mongol women look you straight in the eyes with a slightly scornful air, and ride like the men.”

“Throughout my whole life,” he wrote, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”

September, 1923: They rode back into Peking. The mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in 60 wood crates. The paleontologist Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”

The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. “There are only beings, everywhere,” he had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos.

Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When he was still in college he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came later, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia, but also through Java, India and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life in China in rough conditions far from home. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?

“If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”

Teilhard had glimpsed the Gobi Desert from muleback on his 1923 Ordos expedition. It was the biggest desert on earth: 500,000 square miles of sandstorms and ravaged plateaus in what was then northern Mongolia. “As far as the eye could see around us, over the vast plain which had once been levelled by the Yellow River, waved the grass of the steppes.” The solitudes moved him: the “wide torrential valleys where herds of gazelles could be seen, nose to wind, among the pebbles and the sparse grass … We were crossing the low steppes of San-Tao-Ho. The Mongolians are now no longer here … The season of the yellow winds is over.”

The next morning he broke camp by the waters of the Shiling-Gol and moved towards Kalgan in the Gobi, an area science did not know. He found fossils. Two days later he was wielding a pick at the Dalai-Nor, a wet salt pan twenty-five miles long on the Mongolian steppe. He shook and spread his bedroll on a dune by the shore. Six oxcarts carried supplies and boxes of extinct Tertiary horse and rhino bones.

He resumed his teaching post in Paris the next year; in the next few years he lived again in China, undertook another Gobi expedition, returned to Paris, rode a mule on a geologic journey through the Mabla Massif in Ethiopia, and trekked for months digging bones and breaking rocks in both the Ordos and Manchuria.

In the field he wore a tough jacket and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. In one breast pocket he carried a breviary, and in the other a pack of Gauloises. “This man with the clear regard,” a friend called him. He was long-boned, sharp-faced, faintly smiling when serious, and merry in company. When he laughed his face split into planes. All his life he parted his short hair on the side. His friends were mostly geologists, paleontologists, priests, explorers, educated Paris and New York women, and archeologists. Among his friends were an odd trio: Julian Huxley, Henry Clay Frick and Paul Valéry.

He once called God punctiform. “It is precisely because he is so infinitely profound and punctiform that God is infinitely near.” (Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform?)

Of the gospel miracles he wrote, “I feel obliged to admit that I believe not because of but in spite of the miracles.”

Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers—so that, as Teilhard said, “at every moment it releases a given quantity of events that cause distress (failures, disintegrations, death).” That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, and to progress or even proceed, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.” It is hard to find a more inarguable explanation for the physical evil and the suffering we endure at chance from the material world.

“Even when we are exercising all our faculties of belief, Fortune will not necessarily turn out in the way we want but in the way it must.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and writer as well as a paleontologist. The theology and cosmology that drove his thinking and writing are not his strongest legacy, any more than William Butler Yeats’s theology and cosmology are. He wrote eighteen books. The unhappy prominence of his dull and crackpot The Phenomenon of Man thirty years ago, and the sometimes nutty enthusiasm of his admirers, some of them vague-brained New-Agers, have obscured his excellent The Divine Milieu and the short and magnificent literary essays “The Mass of the World” and “The Heart of Matter.” The world rarely can or will distinguish art from mere opinion; pressed for his opinions, Teilhard produced them, and their peculiarly disagreeable lexicon, and the cranks they attracted in the U.S., possibly convinced some possessors of good minds to write him off without reading him.

He took theology courses for four years, and admitted that he did not find them bien amusants. He studied chemistry and physics in Cairo; at the Sorbonne he worked in botany and zoology as well as geology. His doctorate in geology described mammifers of the Lower Eocene in France.

He ran afoul of Roman authorities over his thinking. In the 1920s evolution was still a new current in thought, as the church reckoned, and it had not yet penetrated Rome’s layers of brocade. The notion of biological evolution seemed to hash the old doctrine of original sin. After Teilhard lectured on evolution in Paris, the church in Rome gagged him. It forbade him to lecture and to publish anything but purely scientific articles. He complied. Of his eighteen books, the church permitted only one to see light in his lifetime, a short scientific monograph published in Peking. The cardinals were pleased to keep his person, also, tucked away. They exiled him to China, the second time for virtually the rest of his life. He was forty-three. Always longing for France, for his Paris teaching position, his Jesuit brothers, and friends, and always eager to settle for a life in the United States, he nevertheless discovered, gradually, that his vow of obedience required him to renounce the West for twenty-two years more.

Every year he applied to publish his work; every year Rome refused. Every year he applied to return to France. Every year Rome refused. At last Rome let him visit France when he was sixty-five; he had had a heart attack. Again, though, Rome prohibited his publishing. Offered a fine teaching post, he went to Rome in person to seek permission; Rome denied it. He traveled to the United States, to South America and to Africa, and he visited Paris to spread his ideas by talking. Even when he was seventy-three and dying of heart disease in New York, Rome forbade his publishing, lecturing and returning to France.

Why did he put up with it? One of his colleagues said he had “the impatience of a prophet.” When did he show impatience? His colleagues and many of his friends urged him to quit the Jesuits. Only for a few weeks, however, did he consider leaving the order. To kick over the traces, he thought, would betray his Christianity. People would think he was straying from the church—perish the thought. His brother Jesuits defended him and his thinking. Leaving the order would mean, he decided, “the killing of everything I want to liberate, not destroy.” The Catholic church, he wrote late in life, is still the best bet for an arch to God, for the transformation of man, and for making, in his view, evolution meaningful; it is “the only international organization that works.”

He had dedicated his life wholeheartedly, again and again; consequently he did not complain. When he first learned that Rome banned publication of The Divine Milieu, he did, however, allow himself to write a friend in private that it was “a pity.” The year before he died, while he was declaring in sincere letters that Rome was mankind’s best hope, he also blew off steam, like many a cleric; he wrote a friend, “The sin of Rome is not to believe in a future … I know it because I have stifled for fifty years in this sub-human atmosphere.” He apparently felt strongly both ways. Later Vatican II calmly endorsed most of his ideas.

“All that is really worthwhile is action,” Teilhard wrote. “Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought.”

II

“I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ,” Father Teilhard explained cheerfully at the end of a book in which he tracked his ideas. His evolving universe culminates in Christ symbolically (“Jesus must be loved as a world”) and to a degree unpalatable. “As much as anyone, I imagine,” he went on, “I walk in the shadows of faith”—that is, in doubt. Doubt and dedication often go hand in hand. And “faith,” of course, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in conscious and rededicated relationship to God. Nevertheless, the temptation to profess creeds with uncrossed fingers is strong. Teilhard possessed, like many spiritual thinkers, a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox.

It was in 1928, when Teilhard was forty-seven, that his team found Peking Man. An archeologist, Pei Wen-chung, found a man’s skull. Teilhard had unearthed the first tools and hearths in the Ordos, but here were the first bones. The skull from the cave near Peking caused a sensation; it was the first bit of ancient human bone unearthed in all Asia.

Time had stuffed Peking Man, and all his pomps and works, down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian. Fossils crammed the red fissure. The team called the skull’s first owner Peking Man. His species was Homo erectus.

The team originally found the Zhoukoudian cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many folk in China drink suspended fossil bone powders as elixirs—dragon’s teeth; consequently paleontologists for two generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, “Where did these bones come from?” Shopping for fossils, a specialist recognized an ancient human tooth. His inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian—Dragon Bone Hill.

Teilhard hauled his camp cot from Peking, lived with Chinese villagers and directed the dig. Over years he sorted and eventually named the fissure’s animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas and “a large and a small bear.” Ultimately, and crucially, he was able to date Peking Man to the Pleistocene. He established the date by many methods, one of which was interesting: among the bits of debris under, around and above various layers of Peking Man’s bones and tools were skulls of mole-rats, and pieces of skulls of mole-rats. He undertook his own study of the mole-rats’ evolving skulls, dated them and so helped fix Peking Man’s dates.

The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major lifework.

During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office—the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic church (and the Anglican Church). A British historian who knew him described his “kindly and ironic grace,” his “sharp and yet benevolent refinement.”

In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for the discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty and exasperation: “Heads,” he said, “practically nothing but heads.” Paleontologists from all over the world are again—seventy years later, after several decades’ chaos halted the work—finding hominid bones, and choppers and flakes, in the Zhoukoudian caves.

Peking Man and his people walked upright; with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes and the Florida peninsula lifted from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed in North America. They lived before two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, and covered the British Isles, northern Germany and the northern United States; they lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is extinct, like the Neandertals’.

Most paleontologists believed until recently that we—we humans in the form of Homo erectus—left Africa 90,000 years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley’s end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent much older erectus finds in Java, China and the Republic of Georgia seem to show that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years earlier—unless humans arose in Asia. The new ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect would be accustomed to this sort of thing by now—this repeated knocking out the back wall, this eerie old light on the peopled landscape.

Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then seriatim into China, Japan and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. In Australia on a rock shelter we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. People—including erectus—plied Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.

“However far back we look into the past,” Teilhard said, “we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.”

During the violence and famine when the Japanese invaded China during the Second World War, that first Peking-Man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized it and drank it. There is a plaster cast of this skull, as there is of every bit of bone and tooth—forty people’s remains—that the team found by working the site for all those years. The plaster casts proved handy, as every single one of the Peking Man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in the war. When the Japanese invaded, scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine doctor who tried to carry them back as luggage. The Japanese caught him. Before he went to prison he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. Four years later when the war ended he left prison; the crates had disappeared. Recent searches drew blanks.

The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking Man. And of Christianity he said: “We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.”

Teilhard, according to his biographer Robert Speaight, “was not very much bothered by ‘who moved the stone.’”

“We are Christians,” he wrote deadpan in a 1936 letter, “in a somewhat renovated manner.” A modern abbot, Abbé Paul Grenet, quoted this in a 1966 biography, published by Eriksson, which describes Teilhard as always faithful to his calling and to the order of Jesuits.

“The great Neolithic proprietor,” the paleontologist called him, the God of the old cosmos, who was not yet known as the soul of the world but as its omnipotent mage. This God caused everything that happened; history, then, was a fix. He called the idea that we suffer at the hands of an omnipotent God “fatal.” It is fatal, that is, to the idea of God’s omnipotence.

III

Early spring, 1930, Father Teilhard, wearing his clerical collar, was having afternoon tea in the Peking courtyard of his new friend, the American woman Lucile Swan. He sat erect and relaxed, on a bamboo chair at a rattan table laughing and talking. In the other bamboo chair Lucile Swan turned his way; she looked mightily amused. A headband held her short, curly hair from her firm and wide-boned face. She wore an open parka and pants; it was perhaps chilly for taking tea outdoors. Her small dog, white and brown, sat at her knee watching the merriment, all ears.

He was forty-nine; she was forty, a sculptor, divorced. It was over a year after the Peking Man discovery; he was living in a village near the Zhoukoudian cave and coming into Peking once a week. The two had met at a dinner party. They liked each other at once: “For the first time in years I felt young and full of hope again,” she recalled. She had attended Episcopal boarding school and the Art Institute of Chicago. In Peking she made portrait sculptures in clay and bronze, and groups of semi-abstract figures; throughout her life she exhibited widely. Soon the two established a daily routine in Peking: they took a walk, had tea at five, and he returned across the city to the Jesuit house at six. Those first several years, they laughed a great deal—about, among many other things, the American comic “The Little King,” which Lucile found in her New Yorkers and translated for him.

“Lucile was fine-featured, amply bosomed,” a friend who joined them at tea recalled, “beloved by all who knew her. For she glowed with warmth and honest sentiment.” And Father Teilhard was “a lean, patrician priest … the jagged aristocrat. He radiated outward, gravely, merrily, inquiringly. And always with a delicate consideration for the other and no concern for self.”

June, 1930: “Our blue tents are pitched at the edge of a fossil-bearing cliff looking out over the immense flat surface of Mongolia,” he wrote. “We work in solitude.” He knew he could not post this letter for several months, for he was tracing the wild bounds of Outer Mongolia. “Cut off from any correspondence, I feel that my Paris hopes are dormant.” He was not yet writing letters to Lucile Swan. In the Gobi Desert—the “immense austere plains”—he lost a cigarette lighter. These things happen.

He had interrupted his Zhoukoudian caves excavation to join an American expedition—the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews expedition, officially called the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. Most of his past five years he had already spent traveling with mules to dig the great Gobi marches; the Roy Chapman Andrews expedition would take him even further afield. To fix Peking Man in context, he wanted to discover the geologic history of the Quaternary through all of Asia. And in fact, over the expedition’s wild and crawling journey, which lasted most of a year, he found the evidence to link and date Chinese and Mongolian strata.

The American Andrews expedition was a step up for the monsieur accustomed to mules. They drove Dodge trucks. Strings of camels carried gas. Digging, they encountered between five and ten poisonous brown pit vipers every day. The vipers kept them alert, one team member reported; characteristically, Teilhard never mentioned them in his letters. He liked Roy Chapman Andrews, who made his name finding dinosaur eggs. “A wonderful talker,” he described him, and a hunter who, when the team lacked food, drove off into the bright expanses and returned “with a couple of gazelles on the running boards.” His own vitality still battened on apparent paradox. The man who said that his thirty months on the front in the war had made him “very mystical and very realistic” now wrote from his blue tent in Mongolia, “Rain, storms and dust and icy winds have only whipped up my blood and brought me rest.” They called that place Wolf Camp, for the wolves and eagles hunted there.

“Purity does not lie in a separation from the universe, but in a deeper penetration of it,” he wrote.

The next year he attached himself to a French expedition as its geologist. The 1931 Croisière Jaune expedition took nine months and crossed Asia to the Russian frontier. He doubled his knowledge of Asia. He went so far west he realized one day he was halfway from Peking to Paris. He and the other Frenchmen traveled by Citroën caterpillar across “great folds of impassable land.” They breached what the paleontologist admired as the unending corrugations of the Gobi peneplain and the monumental formations of Upper Asia. They crossed a region where mountains rose 21,000 feet. The Silk Road’s northern route took them west to the Pamir Mountains as far as Afghanistan. On the road, the others reported, the paleontologist often stopped his Citroën halftrack, darted ahead into the waste and picked up a chipped green rock, a palaeolith or a knob of bone.

“This vast ocean-like expanse, furrowed by sharp ridges of rock, inhabited by gazelles, dotted with white and red lamaseries … I am obliged to understand it.” He examined the juncture where the foot of “the huge ridge of the Celestial Mountains” plunged 600 feet below sea level into the Turfan Deep. The Turfan Deep, in turn, opened onto a “vast depression” in which the River Tarim lost itself “in the shifting basin of the Lop-Nor.”

“I still, you see, don’t know where life is taking me,” he wrote his friend Max Begoüen. “I’m beginning to think that I shall always be like this and that death will find me still a wanderer.” He was forty-eight. He was correct about his death.

Returning mid-winter, the team explored an immense section of the Gobi no one had mapped. The temperature stuck between -20 and -30 degrees C. They dared not let the caterpillars’ engines stop. Twice a day they halted and stood, almost immobile in furs, by the mess-vehicle, and tried to drink boiling soup in tin mugs before it froze.

He wrote, “Till the very end of time, matter will always remain young, exuberant, sparkling, new-born for those who are willing.”

By the time he was fifty, he said, he had awakened to the size of the earth and its lands. In only his first ten years there, he explored China at walking pace from the Pacific to the Pamir Mountains as far as Afghanistan, and from the Khingan Mountains northeast of Mongolia south to Vietnam. He had returned from the Croisière Jaune expedition, worked all spring in Peking and traveled throughout the fall. It was then, three years after he met her, that he began writing letters to the sculptor Lucile Swan with whom he had taken so much tea behind her red courtyard gate.

In his salutations “Lucile, dear friend” quickly became “Lucile, dear” and then “Dearest.” She remained “Dearest” (sometimes he underlined it) for twenty-three years until he died. Their published correspondence—hundreds of letters apiece—knocks one out, for of course she loved him, and he loved her. “I am so full of you, Lucile.—How to thank you for what you are for me! … I think that I have crossed a critical point in my internal evolution, those past months,—with you.—” “My dream,” he wrote her, “is to make you gloriously happy.”

She translated his work. She molded for science a fleshed head of Peking Man. For her he sounded out his ideas. One idea he returned to drearily often was his commitment to his vows. He told her, “I do not belong to myself.” In an essay he wrote, “Through woman and woman alone, man can escape from isolation”—but in right passion love will be, predictably, spiritual. “Joy and union,” he wrote her, “are in a continuous common discovery. Is that not true, dearest?” He never broke any of his vows. (Both men and women who live under religious vows agree that while communal living irritates them most, obedience is by far the toughest vow, and not chastity as secular people imagine. Not a monk, Teilhard had no trouble from twenty-four-hour communal living; obedience chafed him sorely; and he confided later that to maintain chastity he had, quite naturally, “been through some difficult passages.”)

Lucile Swan wrote him, “It seems sometimes that I have to accept so many things.” In her private journal she wrote, “Friendship is no doubt the highest form of love—and also very difficult.” As the years passed, he lived in Peking and visited France; he traveled to South America, Burma, India, South Africa, Rhodesia and Java. They both lived in Peking, for the most pan, for twenty-two years after they met, until in 1941 she moved to the United States. Missing him sometimes by a few days, she traveled in those years and in the following fourteen years to France, Rome, Ethiopia, Switzerland, Siam, London and India. In 1952, when he was seventy-one years old, he moved to New York City, where she was living and exhibiting. They met frequently; “We still disturb each other,” he wrote her across town. Especially disturbing to her was his new and deep friendship with another woman—another American, a novelist.

Even three years later, after he had survived a heart attack, and after hundreds of their love letters had flown all over the world for decades, after hundreds of reunions and partings, and after hundreds of visits in New York, he wrote her that he hoped that “things” would “gradually settle emotionally.” There was not much “gradually” left, as he died eleven days later. He was seventy-four. A snapshot of Lucile Swan outdoors in her sixties shows a magnificent beauty. A dog is looking at her face; the dog holds one end of a towel in its teeth, she holds the other in her hand; the dog is clearly waiting for her to do her part right. She lived ten years after he died.

“What is born between us is for ever: I know it,” the man wrote her. One fervently hopes so. One hopes, too—at least this one does—that in heaven souls suffer fewer scruples, or, better yet, none at all.