Underland: A Deep Time Journey Quotes
"The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree."
"Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows."
"We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most."
"Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save."
"We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet."
"What we know of WIMPs suggests that they are heavy and were created in sufficiently vast quantities in the seconds after the birth of the universe to account for the missing mass."
"If we're not exploring, we're not doing anything. We're just waiting."
"To hear the breath of the birth of the universe, you must come below ground to what are, experimentally speaking, among the quietest places in the universe."
"In burial, the human body becomes a component of the earth, returned as dust to dust – inhumed, restored to humility, rendered humble."
"It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science."
"If there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing."
"No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence."
"Are you surprised we don’t fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?"
"I’m amazed I’m able to hold the hand of the person I love."
"Wood’s better than steel: it squishes rather than snapping. Much safer."
"The world has changed too much. So I said, 'No, we are in the Anthropocene.'"
"What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain."
"We have become titanic world-makers, our legacy legible for epochs to come."
"A trace fossil is a bracing of space by a vanished body, in which absence serves as sign."
"We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind."
"A long rusted steel tunnel slopes into the coastal bedrock, a descent into the underland."
"To enter The Arcades Project is to enter a labyrinth of passages that never repeat their routes."
"Our waking existence leads down into the underworld, the realm from which dreams arise."
"Benjamin's imagination was drawn to enclosed and underground spaces, a 'subterranean city' beneath Paris."
"Paris is built over a system of caverns, a technological system interconnecting with ancient vaults."
"Beneath the south of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of galleries and chambers."
"The catacombs became a 'Temporary Autonomous Zone': a place for new identities and wild ways."
"Cities extend upwards into the air and downwards through tunnels, basements, and mine workings."
"The visible city has its invisible counterpart, just as a mountain does not end at its summit."
"For centuries, quarrying was ill-regulated and unmapped, leading to sinkholes known as fontis."
"The Parisian dead were pressing hard upon the living, leading to the use of the catacombs."
"Fatalities in the quarry were rare, but daily exposure to mineral dust led to ruined bodies."
"I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make."
"It was as if time had been abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years of separation no longer existed, and we were not alone, the painters were here too."
"Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away."
"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."
"These acts of marking are irrefutable – but the immediate circumstances of their making are scarcely retrievable."
"Ecologically, it is an island of four zones: peaks, peat, marsh, beach."
"The Gulf Stream will be the oil’s conveyor belt."
"The pain of solastalgia arises from staying put."
"Its four-foot wings hang around it like an oversized cloak."
"Two men in a big black car and dark glasses, one wearing a dead raccoon on his head, the other scanning lonely houses through a pair of binoculars."
"The days blaze with metal light: silver off the snow, gold in the sun, iron in the shadows."
"A fifty-foot snow-devil wanders towards me, hits me with a hiss that rises to a crackling roar."
"The wind has already whittled away the loose snow around my prints so that they are starting to stand out from the snow."
"The substances we have made are relentlessly accumulating around us, forming a very present past."
"Each of us is implicated in the effects of the epoch, each of us an author of its making and its legacies."
"‘My god is the god of stone,’ Bjørnar says with a quiet smile."
"Come! Macfarlane! Sit here and be King of Andøya for a few minutes!"
"A group of mothers and children are walking along the path by the sea."
"The air is split by a high howl, and immediately thirty or forty other howls join it in chorus."
"The berg sweats, the man flenses the porpoise, the children and the dogs bounce and howl."
"Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age."
"The colour of deep ice is blue, a blue unlike any other in the world – the blue of time."
"Each of those air bubbles is a museum, a silver reliquary in which is kept a record of the atmosphere at the time the snow first fell."
"The idea of the Anthropocene repeatedly strikes us dumb."
"The sun shines through it. Air bubbles inside it show as silver: wormholes, right-angle bends, incredible zigzags and sharp layers."
"Ice, like oil, has long disobeyed our categories. It slips, slides, will not stay still."
"It is unsurprising that ice should have proved so ungraspable to human habits of meaning-making, for ice is a shape-shifter and a state-shifter."
"Ice erases mountain ranges, but preserves air bubbles for millennia and is tender enough to bear a human body unriven for centuries."
"A ‘glacial pace’ used to mean movement so slow as to be almost static. Today’s glaciers, however, surge, retreat, vanish."
"In indigenous cultures that live adaptably in close contact with ice, it has always been an ambiguous entity."
"Glaciers appear in these stories as actors – aware and intentful, sometimes benign and sometimes malevolent."
"The recession of Himalayan glaciers threatens the livelihoods and lives of more than a billion people in Asia."
"We are now experiencing ice as a newly lively substance. For centuries, the polar regions were conventionally imagined as inert."
"The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is breaking up, disassembling itself into bergs and sheets that drift unbiddably."
"Ice sharpens eyesight, and it breeds mirages."
"Ice changes colour like a chameleon. Ice crystals at 30,000 feet set halos and parhelia shining around the sun and the moon."
"Ice has become dirty, in the sense of Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’."
"The little berg takes two days to melt. It leaves a stain on the dark rock that won’t vanish."
"Big climbing days of glacier and peak come and go. The willow leaves turn from yellow to orange."
"That evening we sit together, exhausted, companionable. It is a time of cusps."
"A big calving wakes me in the night. Minutes later, waves surge up the shoreline rocks."
"We leave early the morning after next, carrying heavy packs: gear for several days away."
"The glacier hisses. It crackles. Sometimes a bank of slush ice collapses into a melt-stream."
"The morning after that we wake at five in half-light. We break camp on the rock island quickly, nervously."