Free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

 

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 91

A small bright sparkle at the end of time

With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use these repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective – to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time.

 

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 89

No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end

"The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present but of the earth which ... had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean," he wrote. "Here are three distinct successive periods of existence, and each of these is, in our measurement of time, a thing of indefinite duration.... The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

 

James Hutton, cited in John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 79

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 

The street migrates into the living room

So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life bursts not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work (for they have the faculty of making their bodies tables). Housekeeping utensils hang from balconies like potted plants. From the windows of the top floors come baskets on ropes for mail, fruit, and cabbage. 

Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so, only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room. 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 174 

Building and action interpenetrate

As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its "thus and not otherwise". 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 169

En flyttande människa är inte rotlös

 Alla vet att en flyttande människa inte är rotlös – hon flyttar bara mellan olika hem.

Det finns en hisnande motsättning i de svenska myndigheternas tolkning av ordet "nomad". Eftersom nomader per definition är människor som flyttar, anses de kunna flyttas på.

Elin Anna Labba, Herrarna satte oss hit (Norstedts, 2020) p. 71

The things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

The notion of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network – a "biospheric web" wherein each entity draws its specific character from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others – has today become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty's late description of sesnuous reality, "the Flesh," as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part.

It is this dynamic, interconnected reality that provokes and sustains all our speaking, lending something of its structure to all our various languages. The enigmatic nature of language echoes and "prolongs unto the invisible" the wild, interpenetrating, interdependent nature of the sensible landscape itself.

Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths. "Language is a life, is our life and the life of the things..." It is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 85

it is not human language that is primary

Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84

Language is an evolving medium we collectively inhabit

While individual speech acts are surely guided by the structured lattice of the language, that lattice is nothing other than the sedimented result of all previous acts of speech, and will itself be altered by the very expressive activity it now guides. Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84