There was a book in my parents’ library the memory of which is still sharp, or even more, ever sharper. At the beginning I could only leaf through it, searching for the small ink drawings made by the author himself. Hendrik van Loon was his name. An obdurate name, weathered and promising. The drawings were indeed superb. Heavy, black, awkward, and yet extremely well suited for a book on the history of mankind. Yes, that was its title: The Story of Mankind. It was written sometime in the Twenties, I believe. I remember a scene from the Peloponnesian Wars, a warrior with a raised sword on a narrow path carved in a black cliff; the Prophet traveling from Mecca to Medina, with a black palm tree in the background; a multitude of slaves dragging a huge monolith to the unfinished summit of a pyramid; the walls of Niniveh… Later on I started reading around the drawings in an attempt to give them names, such historic names as “Hendrik von Loon.” I have never read the whole book, but I have read the short piece that served the function of a preface as many times as I could. There was a drawing there as well. A small bird flying toward a huge black rock surrounded by a black sea. According to the author, there is such a rock in the North Sea, and this little bird comes once every thousand years to sharpen its beak on it. By the time the immense rock will have been eroded by this feeble creature, only one day of eternity will have passed. This stark image gave me a rather precise perception of time. After all, the bourgeois subtlety serves some purpose. Most likely the whole book was written, illustrated, and later translated into Serbo-Croatian, in order to provide a proper foundation for this innocent myth. What is striking about it, though, is that it still suggests to me that all the little prehistoric drawings in this book, which has disappeared meanwhile, represent events that happened only yesterday, or even this very morning. Hendrik von Loon succeeded. I will never be able to free myself from his premonition that there is no time.

Addendum (May 19, 1992)

Alas, parables spring from deeper wells. According to a certain Woodward, quoted by Christmas Humphreys in his excellent guide to Buddhism, this story was told by the great teacher:

When asked how long is an aeon, he answered, “Just as if, brother, there was a mighty mountain crag four leagues in length, breadth and height, without a crack or cranny, not hollowed out, one solid mass of rock, and a man should come at the end of every century, and with a cloth of Benares should once on each occasion stroke that rock: sooner, brother, would that mighty mountain crag be worn away by this method, sooner be used up, than the aeon.”[1]

Still, Hendrik van Loon should be praised for the choice of the image that graces his preface. Perhaps he even carefully and correctly attributed the story, but I failed to notice it or simply forgot about it. Perhaps the Buddha himself failed to mention where he had heard the story or his disciples simply forgot about his careful and correct citation of the original source when they recorded his words.

Footnote

1. Humphreys, C., Buddhism: An Introduction and Guide, Third Edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962 (first published in 1951), p. 27, quoting from F.L. Woodward, Some Sayings of the Buddha (no publisher), p. 185.