Dust to dust

"Dust: you've noticed, haven't you, how you just can't seem to get rid of it?  No matter how hard you try, no matter how often you clean - and you do clean, because you look after your house - it just seems to keep on coming back.  But have you ever asked yourself where it comes from?  Because, you know, the answer is surprising. Once you know where it comes from, you realise what it is.  And once you know what dust really is... 

Did you know that most dust is dead human skin?  That's why it keeps coming back, just as if it were growing - because it is.  Or rather somebody else is growing it for you. How does it feel to have somebody else's dead skin in your home, in your kitchen, in your bedroom, falling onto your loved ones, into their hair, into their eyes, into their mouths? 

But it's not only dead skin from humans.  Dust is dead skin from mangy dogs, from dead birds, from infested rats in the sewers.  It's a billion dead flies and maggots and lice, it's all the disgusting sweat and filth and ordure and vomit that animals and insects excrete and spew out every day of their lives - and it's right here, in your home, now.  How does it feel to be surrounded by all that dirt, to be eating in it, sleeping in it?  Don't you desperately need a vacuum cleaner - at this very instant?"

The door-to-door sales pitch is very persuasive.  After all, the dust is demonstrably there - they will gladly demonstrate - and they're right about the skin: a high proportion of dust is old human skin, though mostly yours, probably.  So perhaps you should buy that vacuum cleaner...

Before you reach for your chequebook you might like to cast your mind back to one of those hoary old chestnuts beloved of maths and physics masters at school.  The one about calculating how much of Julius Caesar's dying exhalation is in each breath you take.  You may recall that it turns out that you have about a million molecules in common.  And yet that figure never worried you, did it? 

So was it simply that as the dying breath of an emperor, his molecules were somehow acceptable?  Of course not: the point is all molecules of a given type are by definition the same.  Whether you breathe in some of the last gasp of Julius Caesar or of Adolf Hitler - as you are also doing - makes not the slightest difference. 

And so it is with dust.  By the time whatever dust was before it became dust passes into that state it loses its particularly identity - just as Julius Caesar's breath does - and becomes an anonymous chemical.  To be sure, it can still cause problems for people with allergies, and it can still contain noxious substances.  But it is on these objective grounds that we should worry about dust, not on emotional ones about its origin.

We should see dust as something that we have in common with everyone and everything else in the world, rather than grounds for a futile attempt at apartness.  Dust unites us through its origin - it comes from us all; in its impartial generosity - it goes to us all; and in its all-encompassing nature - it is us all, and we are it.

(24.12.91)

Index