Call my collecting phrases about time a favorite pastime. I often hear in my ear what Paul Bowles, one of my favorite writers, calls "the hiss of time." Just so, yet if you think long and hard about how time works, it can make you batty. Consider the idea of Deep Time: those eons when no human walked upon the Earth and those eons to come when we shall not longer walk here.
Claude Albritton's book The Abyss of Time, a 1981 finalist for the National Book Award, showed me how insane a few influential folks got, when presented with the facts: that the age of Mother Earth is so vast as to stagger the imagination and put our hubris right in its place. Those misguided folk who think the Earth to be 6,000 years old are prime examples of the sort of anti-rationalism that a confrontation with a hard truth can bring. Their intellectual first cousins deny climate change.
We should perhaps all show a bit of humility. As an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Peter Brannen shows me rather conclusively, these deniers and I need to just get over our ridiculous squabbles. In time, in fact, to a future geologist:
The clear-cutting of the rain forest to build roads and palm-oil plantations, the plowing of the seabed on a continental scale, the rapid changes to the ocean and atmosphere’s chemistry, and all the rest would appear simultaneous with the extinction of the woolly mammoth. To future geologists, the modern debate about whether the Anthropocene started 10 minutes ago or 10,000 years ago will be a bit like arguing with your spouse on your 50th wedding anniversary about which nanosecond you got married.
Do yourself a favor and read Brannen, then go pick up H.G. Wells's masterful The Time Machine. The novel has an ending so difficult for President Roosevelt that he demanded that Wells tell him that the future would not turn out that way. I do not know how Wells replied, but it must have been delightful to have a President who read books, and it would be delightful to have one again.
My little plan, Deist and reader of Stoic philosophy that I am, is to is employ whatever time I have to making things better for those who come after me. Yes, we'll all end up a millimeter-thick stratum of organic and inorganic matter, unrecognizable in geological time. If Brannen's claims are correct, as the geological record tells us they must be, I think we still have a moral imperative not to inflict suffering needlessly. By trashing the land, we make life more difficult for those who follow us.
This alone should let us get through this time of a catastrophically bad President, a culture "war" in our nation, and a parade of bad news globally. Yet to do nothing because our species is ephemeral seems tragically short-sighted.
By improving the land and teaching others how to tend the land, eat well, leave camp better than they found it, we are doing something meaningful, even though our names, deeds, possessions, nation, language, civilization, and even species may be gone sooner than we could imagine. I would like those who come after us to love and respect us. Not curse us.
In an odd way, one of our most nihilistic of writers would agree. Bowles wrote, in The Sheltering Sky, "There is a way to master silence. Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners, and listen to the hiss of time outside." This is not a call to inaction. Bowles was a thoughtful mentor, talented composer, and careful writer his entire life, not a decadent. He helped other writers. He employed one of Morocco's last traditional story-tellers as his helper, then recorded and published the stories. It helped preserve a tradition that seemed doomed to vanish like a city buried by the Sahara.
Given that you are a speck riding about on a speck that circles a glowing speck hurtling through infinite darkness, how will you, my fellow speck, listen to the hiss of time?
I'm going to keep testing some reusable canning lids and report back to you. I hear they may fail a bit more often than the metal sort. How's that?
Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Rock those strata!
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