What Does Deep Time Mean? - The Atlantic

The idea that humans are ephemeral compared to the workings of nature isn’t as persuasive as it once was.

Late one summer night in 1949, the British archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock covered by its thin layer of soil, and felt the hard ground pressing her flesh against her bones. Shimmering through the leaves and out beyond the black lines of her neighbors’ chimney pots were the stars, beacons “whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it,” as she put it in A Land (1951), her classic book of imaginative nature writing. We are accustomed to the idea of geology and astronomy speaki

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