A Writer Asks for Help (Part Two)

I'm glad people feel that deep time can be inspiring and impressive. But I'm still wondering how to tell the story so that readers feel their lives are part of a process not just an insignificant line of sand on a two-thousand foot wall. I'm looking for a metaphor that can express the dependence of all generations on the ones that came before. Any suggestions? Anything in Dante? The Bhagavad Gita?

Comments

[Chris Crawford]

Perhaps you are going about this wrong. I made a necklace some years back consisting of about 50 beads. The first bead is a fragment of an iron-nickel meteorite, perhaps 4 billion years old. The second is made from banded iron, the first indication of life on this planet, about 2 billion years old. Next comes a stromatolite at 1 billion years old. And so it continues through trilobyte, dinosaur tooth, petrified wood, copralite, Paleolithic flint tool, wooly mammoth ivory, Sumerian bead, pumice from Pompeii, medieval arrowhead, parchment, Civil War bullet, trinitite, concluding with a piece of pure silicon. The necklace fascinates all who see it. Yes, it humbles one to see the history of this planet in a single necklace, but it is inspiring as well. Why is this such a bad thing?