Time isn't deep, it is always already all around us

Time isn't deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 273

Structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata

Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscoqw will largely erode into sands and gravels, to be spread by wind and water into unreadable expanses of desert. The coastal cities of new York and Amsterdam, those claimed soonest by the rising sea levels, will be packed more carefully into soft-settling sediments. It is the invisible cities – the undercities – that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock. The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence. Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids – these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) pp. 170-171 

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 138 

We all carry trace fossils within us

We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 79 

We live on a restless Earth

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 breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) pp. 15-16 

Deep time opens into the future as well as the past

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, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 15