The Fascinating Power Of Human Wormholes

One of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life happened on a porch in East Austin. I had brought George Raveling, then 80, to visit with Richard Overton, then 111.

It struck me as ​these two kind and wise men​ chatted that I was in a sort of human wormhole.

When George was born in 1937 (he writes about this in his beautiful new book ​What You’re Made For​, which I was lucky enough to play a small part in getting it published), the Golden Gate Bridge had just opened, the Great Depression ravaged America and Pablo Picasso was putting the finishing touches on his haunting, heartbreaking anti-war mural, “Guernica” as Europe plunged itself back into violence.

When Richard Overton was born in 1906, just a few miles down the road from my ranch, Theodore Roosevelt was president. As a child in Texas, he remembered seeing Civil War veterans walking around. Not many, but they were there—men who had fought for a Confederacy that had enslaved his ancestors. When he was a kid, Henry L. Riggs, a veteran of the Black Hawk War, was still alive. Riggs was born in 1812. And when Riggs was born, Conrad Heyer, a Revolutionary War veteran and the earliest-born person to ever be photographed, was still alive.

It’s easy to forget how little time separates us from what we think of as “history.” Richard plus two other people takes you back to before America was a country. He was a teenager during WWI, served in WWII, and then lived long enough to be the nation’s oldest living veteran at 112 and to hold my son, who, born in 2016, might live to see the 22nd century.

Here’s my son with Richard Overton

It’s easy to see history as this distant thing that happened to other people–people on the page or in old portraits. George played college basketball against Jerry West…the man who became the NBA logo. George Raveling was there the day of the March of Washington in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. came down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and handed him the copy of the speech he gave that day. And then just a few decades later, George helped bring a young rookie named Michael Jordan to Nike, beginning a process that would turn Jordan into a billionaire. George would meet six or seven presidents starting with Truman. Richard would be flown to the White House to meet Obama.

Just two guys and you have a good chunk of American–and world–history. Just two guys shaking hands or witnessing or taking part in events and people that resound to this day.

History isn’t something distant or abstract. It’s just a few handshakes away. Just a few degrees of separation, it turned out, from one of my neighbors.

The past is not dead and distant, Faulkner observed. It’s not even past.

Did you know that England’s government only recently paid off debts it incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the South Sea Bubble, the Napoleonic wars, the empire’s abolition of slavery, and the Irish potato famine? For more than a decade and a half of the twenty-first century, there was still a direct and daily connection to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even today, the United States continues to pay pensions related to the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.

Did you know that in 2013 they discovered living whales ​born​ before Melville published ​Moby Dick​? Or the world’s oldest tortoise, Jonathan, lives on an island in the Atlantic and is 192 years old? Or that President John Tyler, born in 1790, who took office just ten years after little Jonathan was born, still has living grandchildren?

And that’s all relatively ‘modern’ history. The woolly mammoth was still roaming the earth while the pyramids were being built. Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those pyramids. When British workers dug the foundations for Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, they found the bones of actual lions—creatures that had once roamed the exact spot they were standing on. History isn’t some far-off, untouchable thing. It’s right under our feet.

When we were doing a small construction project at the bookstore recently, we moved an old antique bar and found some paint on the wall, covered in plaster. Carefully scraping it away, we found a date and a kind of sign–January 16, 1922. What was happening in the world that day? Who were the people who stood there and supervised it being painted? A young Richard might have walked by and looked at it (from the outside, of course, as it was probably segregated).

When I lived in New Orleans, my apartment was partitioned out of a 19th-century convent. I’d head uptown ​to write what became my first book​, hopping on the longest continually running streetcar in the world, the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Line. A train that has traveled the same tracks for nearly 200 years. How many millions of people have ridden those same rails? Sat, even, in the same seat? Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, George Washington Cable, Edgar Degas—could have looked out these very windows. They, along with so many others not as easily remembered, lived and struggled just as I did. Just as you do.

In Goethe’s ​The Sorrows of Young Werther​ (a favorite of Napoleon’s), there is a scene in which Werther writes to a friend about his daily trip to a small, beautiful spring. He sees the young girls coming to gather water and thinks about how many generations have been doing that—have come and had the same thoughts he is having.

“When I sit there,” he explains, “I see them all. The ancestral fathers, making friends and courting by the spring, I sense the benevolent spirits that watch over springs and wells. Oh, anyone who cannot share this feeling must never have refreshed himself at a cool spring after a hard day’s summer walking.”

I think about the things that happened in George’s life. I think about the horrible things that happened during Richard’s. I think about the progress made in both. I think of how much has changed…and how much has remained the same. I remember as I sat there on the porch, as Richard told me about a tree he had planted that was, some seven decades later, pushing up the foundation of the house, thinking of the Bible verse that Hemingway opens his book, ​The Sun Also Rises​, with: “One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose.” It was this passage, his editor would say, that “contained all the wisdom of the ancient world.”

Richard Overton on his porch (2017)

The view from Overton’s porch

And what wisdom is that? One of the most striking things about history is just how long human beings have been doing what they do. Though certain attitudes and practices have come and gone, what’s left are people—living, dying, loving, fighting, crying, laughing.

Instability. Uncertainty. Danger. Division.

This is one of the most consistent themes of the Stoics and particularly of ​Meditations​, the way that events flow past us like a river, the way the same things keep happening over and over again. That’s what history was, Marcus Aurelius, whether it was the age of Vespasian, his own, or some time even more distant—it was “people doing the exact same things: marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power.”

From this angle, human life looks very small. But also a connection with the past can make you feel very big–like you’re a part of something. That we are much more interconnected and closer to the center of things than it sometimes feels.

Indeed, these wormholes, illustrating the “great span” as they do, give us perspective. They remind us how many have been here before us and how close they remain. That even though we are small, we are also a piece of this great universe.

“Look at the past,” Marcus Aurelius writes in ​Meditations​, “and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events.”

There’s something lovely about intersecting with the past, about connecting with it.

I’ll cherish that day with Richard and George, as long as I live.

Hopefully, that will be a long time in the future…but even if it’s not, I feel like by spending time with them my life has already stretched far enough back in time.