After Wednesday’s Class: Deep-time

In our discussion of deep time I didn’t get a chance to introduce two quotations. The first one is from Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and it relates to deep time. He writes:

Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalacites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. . . . There is a dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd—crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile. . . .

We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite—deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us to see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us. When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breaths. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. (15-16)

If you listened to the Robin Kimmerer podcast, these quotations might also bring to mind her comments on the ways that rocks and stones pace time differently than humans and we can see their slow movements when we understand them as animate rather than as inert objects.

Macfarlane again makes a similar comment in an interview about his book, Underland. He says:

Underland argues for a ‘deep time ethic,’ in which contemplating ourselves within a deep-time context should have the effect not of inducing a flat ontology (whereby all things are equalized in worthlessness and transcience by this immense perspective), nor of ethical abrogation (on the grounds that ‘it will be all right in the end’), but rather of ethically charging us with a sense of responsibility now, minute by minute, for the legacies we are leaving behind as communities and as polities—and also of pristinating the present moment into greater clarity and wonder. Implausible as it seems when viewed within epochs and eons of our billion-year old earth, we do exist. You do, I do, somehow, now. (71-72)

The second quotation is from Charles Babbage’s The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) and it relates to our discussion of conversation, the ways in which both Whitman’s and Lerner’s work gestures toward cross-generational conversations, and is suggestive, too, of deep time. Babbage considers how the “pulsations of air” (35) produced by the human voice persist through time, “unseen by the keenest eye, unheard by the acutest ear, unperceived by the human senses” (36). He continues:

the air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. . . . But if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean, are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done. . . . No motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated.

See if you can try to work those comments into your conversations with family and friends in the days to come.