![]() Although with the advent of space flight it became fashionable to picture the planet as a small orb of life and light in a dark, cold void, that image never really took hold. In much the same comforting way that we think of time as imponderably long, we consider the earth to be inconceivably large. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.” It was the sudden summing-up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me, the effect was quite startling. . . . Burroughs again: “One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Last year, for perhaps the first time since that starved Pilgrim winter at Plymouth, America consumed more grain than it grew. In the last decade, an immense “hole” in the ozone layer has opened up above the South Pole each fall, and, according to the Worldwatch Institute, the percentage of West German forests damaged by acid rain has risen from less than ten per cent to more than fifty per cent. In the last three decades, for example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more than ten per cent, from about three hundred and fifteen parts per million to about three hundred and fifty parts per million. But normal time seems to us immune from such huge changes. We have accepted the idea that continents can drift in the course of aeons, or that continents can die in a nuclear second. Over a lifetime or a decade or a year, big and impersonal and dramatic changes can take place. True, evolution, grinding on ever so slowly, has taken billions of years to create us from slime, but that does not mean that time always moves so ponderously. In other words, our sense of an unlimited future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion. The world as we feel comfortable in it dates back to perhaps 1945. The world as we really know it dates back to the Industrial Revolution. The world as we really know it dates back to the Renaissance. And within those twelve thousand years of civilization time is not uniform. Three hundred and twenty is a large number, but not in the way that six hundred million is a large number, not inscrutably large. Three hundred and twenty generations ago, Jericho was a walled city of three thousand souls. From the work of archeologists and from accounts like those in the Bible I have some sense of daily life at least as far back as the time of the Pharaohs, which is almost half the way. And I can conceive of how most of those forebears lived. A skilled genealogist could easily get me one fiftieth of the distance back. That is, I can think back one-ninety-sixth of the way to the start of civilization. Sitting here at my desk, I can think back five generations-I have photographs of four. Using twenty-five years as a generation, that is four hundred and eighty generations ago. People began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some twelve thousand years ago. This idea about time is essentially misleading, for the world as we know it, the world with human beings formed into some sort of civilization, is of quite comprehensible duration. Change takes unimaginable-“geologic”-time. Since even a million years is utterly unfathomable, the message is: Nothing happens quickly. The dinosaurs lived for a hundred and fifty million years. The age of the trilobites began six hundred million years ago. Our mountains have been pulverized by a process almost as slow.” We have been told that man’s tenure is as a minute to the earth’s day, but it is that vast day that has lodged in our minds. “The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying that when the Himalayas have been ground to powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity will only have just begun. ![]() “So slowly, oh, so slowly, have the great changes been brought about,” John Burroughs wrote in 1912. At least since Darwin, nature writers have taken pains to stress the incomprehensible length of this path. ![]() It moves with infinite slowness through the many periods of its history, whose names we can dimly recall from high-school biology-the Cambrian, the Devonian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene.
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