`An Art to Make Dust of All Things'

“Everything and everybody turns to dust. Regardless of what it’s made of, as long as it’s small enough to float around in the air, dust is dust. By definition, dust particles very in size from one-millionth of a millimetre to one millimetre. What you see in the sunlight at home are mostly cotton, wool and paper fibres. On the floor it's mostly sand and clay particles carried in from outside. But of the particles smaller than one-tenth of a millimeter, more than half come from us. More than 50 percent of the finest household dust is made up of flakes of skin.”

Of course, this is merely a science-minded restatement of what we already know from Genesis 3:19: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” I came upon this dust business while rereading The Way of All Flesh by Midas Dekkers, a Dutch writer and biologist. That was shortly before a long-deferred vacuum-cleaning beneath the bed. The nozzle sucked up a fuzzy memento mori of cat fur, human hair and human dust. While probing among the shoes and bins of sweaters stowed under the bed, something popped inside my right knee, reminding me two weeks before my 56th birthday that I’m limping ever dustward.

I looked into dust. It’s old, rooted in words meaning “smoke, vapour.” Shakespeare uses it 63 times in 27 plays, two sonnets and "The Rape of Lucrece." Everywhere, across centuries, dust signifies what is transitory and mutable. Consider Dickens, Eliot and Waugh. Consider Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or Urne-Burial: “Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments.” And Krapp’s musings in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape:

“I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has--when all my dust has settled. I close my eyes and try and imagine them.”

And please don’t forget Kansas. Now back to Dekkers:

“What kind of dust is it we return to? What’s in a person? It’s common knowledge that we consist mostly of water. You could make 66 pots of tea or coffee with the water from one body. After we die, that water evaporates. Dying is mostly evaporating.”