Psalm 9

In times of trouble

Photograph by Matt White

To the leader: according to Muth-labben

I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart.

Sometimes a daddy long legs has six eyes. Sometimes eight. They have unusually short fangs. The life expectancy of a male is about a year, then they mate, then they die.

At negative forty degrees, the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales produce the same reading. In five billion years, the sun will begin to die. The most commonly used noun in the English language is time. 

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, it began to rain. The rain fell for forty days and forty nights.

Albert Einstein, as the story goes, was walking one night in Princeton, New Jersey, with the physicist Abraham Pais. He looked up at the sky and turned to his young colleague, stricken, to ask: “Do you really believe that the moon isn’t there when nobody looks?”

Once I met a drunk at a bar and he asked me if I knew what love is. What is love, I asked him? He spat straight onto the barroom floor. “Timing,” he said.

Moses was on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights. Elijah fell asleep under a juniper tree, and an angel woke him and told him to eat, so that he would have the strength for his journey: Forty days and forty nights to the mount of God, where he found shelter in a cave.

The ancients perhaps meant forty days as a consequential period of time, unspecified, not a literal number of days with a fixed endpoint.

The etymology of quarantine is more precise, from the Italian quarantino, forty days that ships had to be isolated before sailors could come ashore in Venetian ports during the Black Death. The rule was initially thirty days, trentino, originating in the fourteenth century in what is now Dubrovnik. The Venetian Senate mandated forty days in 1448. It is unclear how they settled on that number.

My dad once told me a story about a woman who became distraught on her fortieth birthday. She called her mother, weeping. “I understand,” her mother said. Her daughter told her: “But you couldn’t possibly.”

I began reading Moby Dick aloud to my daughter on the day she was born. On March 20, 2020, she turned thirty-three months old and we made it to Chapter 27: “for everyone knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in the time of cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths.”

This was around when the cherry blossoms bloomed in Jersey City, where we had moved the previous August. We had no idea that we had one in our backyard. It erupted in hot pink one day, and we found ourselves laughing and blushing—as if we had just discovered that we’d taken a gift that belonged to someone else. When my daughter tried to say the word “mask” back then, it came out as a mess of three syllables.

Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. He resisted the tempter; he was tended to by angels. Perhaps this wilderness was on a mountain near the Jordan River, but this is only speculation—the Gospels do not specify. As usual, Mark is more sparse than Luke and Matthew, but does offer one unique detail: He “was with the wild beasts.”

When a sperm whale has trouble digesting something—for example, the beak of a giant squid—it releases a secretion from its bile ducts. The secretion, ambergris, is then released into the water when the whale defecates. After floating in the ocean for years, ambergris can wash up as a waxy, solid lump on shore. Humans find it and make into a rarified perfume. It’s more valuable than gold. During the Black Death, some thought that ambergris would protect them from the plague. Plague doctors wore it inside of their masks.

Muhammad was born in the Year of the Elephant. On the day he was born, his mother Amina saw a flock of birds who flew so close to her that she could feel the flutter of their wings against her skin. In middle age, Muhammad would periodically go into seclusion to pray. One day, he was alone in a cave on Jabal al-Nour mountain. The cave, known as Hira, was about three and half meters long and one and a half meters wide. By the lunar calendar, Muhammad was forty years old. The archangel Gabriel appeared. “Read,” said Gabriel, and recited the first revelation that Muhammad received from God.

My father ordered thousands of masks during the pandemic. They filled up first one, then two, drawers in a large chest in my parents’ apartment at their assisted living facility. I can’t remember what had previously been in those drawers. But secluded in their room, they had little need for variety in their wardrobe.

In 1912, Japan gifted 3,020 cherry blossom trees to the United States. The trees traveled just over forty days, first across the Pacific Ocean on the S.S. Awa Maru, then across the United States on insulated train cars.

The cherry blossoms of 1912 replaced a previous gift from Japan of 2,000 trees in 1910. When those arrived in Washington D.C., it was discovered that they were diseased and overrun with bugs and worms. President Taft had the trees burned.

The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years.

When my father got sick with Parkinson’s, if people would ask him how he was doing, he would say, “better than I’ll be doing the next time you see me.” A favorite joke of his was to sing the Rolling Stones song as, “Tiiiiiime is working against us, yes it is.” It’s funny, he said, because it’s true.

When I turned forty years old, I jumped from an airplane. The air rushed so fast it felt like I was drowning. When the parachute released I was thrust suddenly back to slowness and quiet, like jolting up from a dream. The sky is so big, a no man’s land of blue. Sunlight reflected off the top of clouds in splendid color. It felt like a long time that I floated down. A consequential period of time, unspecified—call it forty minutes, forty days, forty years. A friendly man attached to my back pointed below to show me all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, or at least the landmarks of Volusia County, Florida. But I was more interested in what was right in front of me: The wilderness of sky.

When my father was in hospice, music would play all the time in the room. Classical music was one of the great loves of his life. The last concert I went to with him was to see the violinist Joshua Bell play with the Nashville symphony orchestra. He was so moved that he began physically playing along, the only time I’ve ever seen someone play the air violin. So when I went to visit him in hospice, I made sure to change it to the classical station. Late one night, someone changed it back to contemporary Christian after I left, and he died in protest. Just kidding. He just happened to die.

In Eastern Orthodox tradition, after death, the spirit remains on Earth for forty days.

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” wrote Einstein, toward the end of his own life, when a compatriot died. “That means nothing.” He wrote, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

I gave my daughter the cheap digital watch my father happened to be wearing when he died. It is special to her, she says. “Do you want to know what time it is?” she asks.

When we drove to the beach recently, she asked how many seconds were left until we got there, so she could count it off. One thousand five hundred seconds, I told her. She counted. When we arrived, we wanted to swim, but we did not. The water may still be unsafe because of the hurricane. The sand was covered in glass. The short-billed dowitchers ran from the tide and did not mind.

If you live to be forty years old and then live another forty years, your heart will beat more than three billion times.

Let the nations know that they are only human.