Thinking About Deep Time: A Writer Asks for Help

Geologic Time is on display in the Grand Canyon. Does it depress you or fill you with awe to realize that your life's span is, at best, shown by the red line on the right?

Instead of making a long post and giving everybody a week to chew and comment, I'm offering a brief post. After I get some feedback from readers, I'll make another post—and so on throughout the week. The topic for the week is my Babel’s Dawn book, subtitled a natural history of the origins of speech.

I’m making progress and have a first draft of Part One, which begins six million years ago with the last common ancestor of chimpanzees, humans and bonobos and ends a little bit less than 2 million years ago when (probably) the first words were spoken. Four million years in about 25,000 words works out to 160 years per word.  Obviously the year-by-year approach is impossible. The standard solution to this challenge is to write abstractly, discussing theory rather than what happened. But concrete stories are easier to follow and give meaning to otherwise fuzzy ideas, so I prefer to tell stories. In some ways the book of Babel’s Dawn will be quite the saga, covering hundreds of thousands of generations.

Any storyteller knows the basic solution to this approach: take specific periods, say 9 or 10 of them, and tell their stories. That’s my method. What was the situation like 6 million years ago? What was it like 4.5 million years ago? I’m an experienced storyteller, and I think I’m doing a good job, but I’m noticing a problem and I could use some advice about: deep time.

Deep time is geologic time, eons and eons. We are all familiar with tales from geology that say things like “ a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs 75 million years ago.” We nod and go on our merry way. It’s as numbing and abstract as Carl Sagan’s reference to “billions and billions” of stars. Presenting deep time in a saga, however, starts to give these spans some meaning. You read about what the human lineage was like 3.2 million years ago, then 3 million, then 2.7 million years back and these enormous spans of time begin to take on shape, especially when you realize that tens of thousands of generations came and went during those years.

My worry is that forcing readers to think concretely about deep time and thousands of generations will have the side effect of making people realize how short their own life span is and how it will be buried under endless layers of more time. Is that a depressing thought? An awe inspiring recognition? Or a neutral fact?

What are your own reactions to concrete expression of deep time and the enormous number of generations that come and go? Does it scare you? Excite you? Can anybody think of some examples of how other literature has faced the issue of geologic time versus our brief span of remembered time?

Comments

[JanetK]

The calendar and clock metaphor has worked best on me in the past. It is a bit shop-worn but that is probably because it works. Good luck with finding a new one that works as well. I hope you do.
I usually, but not always, find the long geological time inspiring rather than depressing.
I hope you have considered the possibility of singing for the communication of emotion as opposed to content. I can imagine a sort of humming accompanying gestures as a very early pre-language. I have no argument or facts to back it up. It is just an image that 'sits well' in me.

[Giorgio Marchetti]

Hi Edmund

in my view, this is just a way of presenting facts, different from other ways: it has pros and cons. All depends on your final aim/objective, what you want to finally convey and have the reader be conscious/aware of. Therefore use it instrumentally.

Of course side effects occur, always. Sometimes they add unexpected viewpoints to the readers, and even to the writer him/herself who suddenly may realize he/she can say more, or in a different way.

The important is the final, global picture that you want your book to express

[Miriam Gordon]

What beautiful thoughts - as I read this post I felt suspended in a dream. The image of deep time with the red line showing a human life span will evoke all 3 and more reactions from various readers. It is an incredibly powerful and highly worthwhile image to share. Leave the reader's reactions to the readers and go with your gut.
Another thought I had as I read this post is the evolution of metaphor in language. It's almost a necessity considering the vastness of our history. You could actually weave a whole tapestry through your book of metaphor to language skill development in today's human babies. It brings to mind telescopes and microscopes, and what they can reveal to us.
So have I made your job any easier :-)?
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BLOGGER: My job will be easier if I heed the words, "Leave the reader's reactions to the readers and go with your gut." When trusting one's genius, however, it helps to be a genius.

[Esther]

WIth deep time and space, it is all of the above. Mostly I find it comforting, if not inspiring... for example, when re-realizing how numerous yet distant the stars are, I am thrilled by that knowledge as well as how the stars will be there after me, and that they have been there before me.

Perhaps if you offer readers an anchor of some sort within the narrative, either metaphor or concrete, it may aid them not to flounder in the depths of time.

[Nijma]

Creation stories are obvious examples of literature that expresses grandeur about time. But what makes them non-threatening and how to extract it for other purposes...*shrug*

Genesis 1:2: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (there are parallels here with Hermes Trismegistus)

Völuspa, which opens the Old Norse Poetic Edda: "Years ago, when Ymir lived,
There was no sand, no sea, no cold waves;
Earth was not, nor heaven above,
But only a yawning gap, and nowhere grass."

and for some reason I keep thinking of this excerpt from A River Runs Through It:

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters."

The red line is not the life span, the life span is the river running though it, that can see the past (in the rocks'layers), but not the future.

[onno de jong]

Well, if you consider that we are on the threshold of a great extinction (not necessarily ours, for we are resourceful, like rats and cockroaches, and can survive) That the few generations that have used stored sunlight to fuel the industrial revolution experiment will have provided the next generation with a perspective that we do not yet have, that people can witness the collapse of millions of years in the span of a very short life, and that it is the excess of a few people that can be said to be responsible for holding this trajectory that has brought the world to this precipice . . . what a gift to our children, to provide then with such a spectacle, to crush so much for so little. You can imagine what the world was like millions of years ago, how about several hundred years from now?

[jpetral]

When you look out over a vista, the ground closest to you has the most detail and as you look further off the view becomes less detailed and more "sweeping". The same with one's own past. Memories of more recent things are more detailed (and more usefully so). Going backward from the present might emphasize this but it seems natural enough anyway.

This affects the content of our scientific observations as well: the more recent the event, the more we know about it. Also, of course, we are more interested in more recent events. And dare I suggest that the rate of complexification is, in fact, accelerating: the more recent the time, the more has been happening?

Anyway, it would be an interesting problem except that most everyone is already use to it without thinking much about it(!). I suppose that's why when people stare at the vastness of the stars, they sigh and go back inside for some refreshment :).

[María]

“Geologic time versus our brief span”. In spite of our brief span, we can think of geological time. What about Pascal´s “Le roseau pensant”? This might be applied to your issue.

[Kocaeli Haber]

ıs thıs photo of wadi mujib ?
BLOGGER Not unless that is Turkish for the Grad Canyon in Arizona.