Underland: A Deep Time Journey QUOTES

41 " feel the snap of the black stone’s jaws at the empty air below my toes, and then I am out of the swallet and into the hollow, and warm air is rolling around me, and my bones grow again in the storm of light and ferns furl their green over and into me and moss thrives on my skin and leaves teem in my eyes, and Sean and I sit laughing, knowing for those few moments that to understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

42 " Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. 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. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink. There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

43 " ontology "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

44 " 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. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin. The extinction of a species or an ecosystem scarcely matters in the context of the planet’s cycles of erosion and repair. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

45 " our response to it – the way our shouts turned from "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

46 " In that vanishing point, neither of us speaks. Language is crushed. We are anyway too busily engaged building structures within ourselves that might house our spirits, for the pressure here is immense, a weight of rock and time bearing down upon us from every direction with an intensity I have never experienced before, turning us fast to stone. It is a fascinating and terrible place, and not one that can be borne for long. We return to the edge of the ruckle, knowing we must pass back through it – and there lies the end of our thread, our white clue. Without it we could hardly retrace our route through the boulder labyrinth. It would be like memorizing a fifty-word tongue-twister on the way down and then reciting it in reverse on the way back up. I lie down to lead, I follow the thread, and each tiny room in the ruckle opens onto the next as it should, in turn, in order. I pass through the last of the gaps, and as I lift myself into the entry shaft I "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

47 " Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Whales when he realized that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

48 " Yes, each city has its invisible city, as Italo Calvino suggests in his great story of that name. Calvino’s story is itself cleverly nested within tellings of tellings, stories of stories, so that the text possesses multiple versions of itself. In what is to me the most memorable section, the narrator describes the impossible city of Eusapia, in which inhabitants of the living city are accompanied by ‘an identical copy of their city, underground’, a ‘Eusapia of the dead’ which can be accessed only by a confraternity of hooded brothers – though over time the symmetry between upper and lower cities becomes so acute that ‘in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

49 " Deepwater was a rare laying-bare of the darker operations of the global extraction industries. One of the agreement tacitly made by consumers with these industries is that extraction and its costs will remain mostly out of sight, and there undisturbing to its beneficiaries. Those industries understand the market need for alienated labour, hidden infrastructure and the strategic concealment of both the slow violence of environment degradation and the quick violence of accidents. Deepwater violated that agreement shockingly, manifesting a substance on which most modern human life depends but that few people encounter in the raw. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

50 " What Bjørnar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia’, the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales when he realized that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the Anthropocene – we might consider John Clare a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native Northamptonshire countryside disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has certainly flourished recently. ‘Worldwide, there is an increase in ecosystem distress syndromes,’ wrote Albrecht in an early paper on the subject, ‘matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes.’ Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home become unhomely around its inhabitants. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

51 " Ice has a social life. Its changeability shapes the culture, language and stories of those who live near itl "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

52 " We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land. It is mineralization – the ability to convert calcium into bone – that allows us to walk upright, to be vertebrate, to fashion the skulls that shield our brains. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

53 " 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: A Deep Time Journey

54 " Our common verb ‘to understand’ itself bears an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

55 " Moja modlitba pri stole," hovorí Bjornar, "keď doma jeme ryby, ktoré som ulovil, je vždy takáto: Kurva! Ani nevieme, aké máme šťastie! "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

56 " Twelve thousand years ago in a limestone cave above the Hilazon River in what is now northern Israel, a grave was prepared for a woman in her forties. An oval hole was dug in the cave floor, and its sides were walled with limestone slabs. Her body was placed in the grave, curled against the northern side of the oval. Two stone martens, their brown and cream fur sleek in the low light, were draped over her: one across her upper body, one across her lower. The foreleg of a wild boar was laid on her shoulder. A human foot was placed between her feet. The blackened shells of eighty-six tortoises were scattered over her. The tail of an aurochs was put near the base of her spine. The wing of a golden eagle was opened over her. She had become a wondrous hybrid – a being of many beings. At last, a single large plate of limestone was pulled over the hole, closing this compound creature inside her chamber. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

57 " This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends – not with a bang but a visitors’ centre. ‘Welcome to Olkiluoto Island,’ says Pasi Tuohimaa. ‘You made it! "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

58 " Time feels differently reckoned after the mine: further deepened, further folded. My sense of nature feels differently reckoned too: further disturbed, further entangled. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

59 " Beneath a plateau in southern Africa, late in the nineteenth century, miners crawl through miles of narrow tunnel – cut deeper underground here than anywhere else on Earth at this time – lugging ore from a sunken reef of gold. Some of these men, who have migrated to the area in their thousands to work, will die soon in rockfalls and accidents. More will die slowly of silicosis from breathing the rock dust down there in the killing dark, year after year. Here the human body is largely disposable in the view of the corporations that own the mine and the markets that drive it: a small, unskilled tool of extraction to be replaced when it fails or wears out. The ore the men bring up is crushed and smelted, and the wealth it yields lines the pockets of shareholders in distant countries. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey

60 " The idea of the Anthropocene repeatedly strikes us dumb. In the complexity of its structures and the range of its scales within time and space – from nanometric to the planetary, from picoseconds to aeons – the Anthropocene confronts us with huge challenges. How to interpret, or even refer to it? Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures are withdrawn. We find speaking of the Anthropocene, even speaking in the Anthropocene, difficult. It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope. "

― Robert Macfarlane , Underland: A Deep Time Journey