Flight ways into the deep past and future

These are the flight ways into the deep past and future that are contained within the emergent becoming of a species. Generations stretching before and after, beyond the horizon of our temporal comprehension. It is all their work and their possibilities that are at stake in the living and dying albatross bodies that populate this blue planet at any given "now". And so it is under the shadow of all these generations, of a flight way taken – however impossibly – in its entirety, that we must feel the weight of an ethical claim to hold open space for the continuity of this ancient and evolving form of life.

 

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 39

A species must be understood as something like a line of movement

Central to the mode of thought that evolutionary theory opened up is the transition from an understanding of a species as a fixed and eternal "kind" to that of something more akin to a historical lineage stretched between a beginning (speciation) and an inevitable end (extinction). In this context, a species must be understood as something like a "line of movement" through evolutionary time. But it is much more than an empty trajectory. Each species lineage embodies a particular way of life, a particular set of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are passed between generations. But this is also not a static way of life. More than the sum of those individuals currently living, species are engaged in an ongoing intergenerational process of becoming – of adaptation and transformation – in which individual organisms are not so much "members" of a class or a kind, but "participants" in an ongoing and evolving way of life.

 

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 27

There's no sense or meaning in anything

I've long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay.

 

László Krasznahorkai, Satantango (Tuskar Rock Press, 2020) p. 228

Time were a frivolous interlude

He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity...

 

László Krasznahorkai, Satantango (Tuskar Rock Press, 2020) p. 4

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