The Cracked Sphere

(for Paul and Joshua)

It is an image that has been a recurrent part of my imagination from the prehistory of early childhood: a globe, the world, perhaps as seen and so memorably photographed from the reaches of space. I do not have to look closely, so intimate is its companionship, to know that a jagged crack runs from surface to core.

In my youth I took it for my own fractured world, ominous and mysterious, and I wondered how an indelibly broken life could still offer so many occasions for love, intrigue, discovery, laughter. As if in response, I came upon a resonant phrase, "the crack in the cosmic egg." All along, it appeared, I had been patiently accompanied by an ageless image that has echoed through time and across cultures. Dying and giving birth are like the moon's shadow and light, going and coming not in linear sequence but as one uroboric whole.

On the plaza outside the United Nations in New York there is a remarkable sculpture. I have not seen it. I didn't know of its existence until I read this description:

"It consists of an enormous sphere of burnished bronze, suggesting a globe. The sphere is pleasing to behold, even though it startles with its imperfection. There are deep, jagged cracks in its golden-hued surface, cracks too large ever to be repaired. Perhaps its cracked because its defective (like the broken world), one thinks. Or maybe (like an egg) it has to break in order for something else to emerge. Perhaps both. Sure enough, when one peers into the gashes on its surface, there is another brightly shining sphere coming along inside. But that one is already cracked, too!"

So wrote Mary Ann Glendon in her book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001, p. 240).

The charcoal drawing here was made by my son Paul at the kitchen table one morning, in his sketch pad. It literally took my breath away. I'd never told him about cracked spheres in his father's imagination or experience of the world.

A few years later, reading a collection of poems by Joshua, another of my sons, I found the following prayer:

"Help me to build that which will break."