The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time - Hardcover

Raffles, Hugh

 
9780804197991: The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804197997 ISBN 13: 9780804197991
Verlag: Pantheon, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

From the author of the acclaimed Insectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present
 
When Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, as ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own.
 
A moving, profound, and affirming meditation, The Book of Unconformities is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan’s Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in the exuberant but fractious New York City of 1897.
 
As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they’ve engendered, he finds them losing their solidity and becoming as capricious, indifferent, and willful as time itself.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HUGH RAFFLES is the author of Insectopedia, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Orion Book Award and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and of In Amazonia: A Natural History which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have appeared in Best American Essays, Granta, Orion, and The New York Times, and he is the recipientof the Whiting Award for nonfiction. He lives in New York City and is professor of anthropology at The New School.

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PROLOGUE
 
In December 1994 , my youngest sister Franki died unexpectedly in Edinburgh, hemorrhaging during childbirth while giving birth to twins. Three months later, my eldest sister Sally killed herself near London, carefully stuffing the exhaust pipe of her car. Soon after, I started reaching for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories—geological, archaeological, histories before history—and opened unmistakably into absences that echo in the world today, absences not only mineral but human and animal, and occasionally vegetable, too.
 
Geologists call a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment an unconformity. It’s a physical representation of a gap in the geological record, a material sign of a break in time, readily readable once you know where and how to look. The most famous is Hutton’s Uncomformity at Siccar Point near Edinburgh to which, in June 1788, the physician-geologist James Hutton rowed out with his friends John Playfair and James Hall to demonstrate the fact of deep time; that the Earth, contrary to the wisdom of the day, was far more than six thousand years old, that, in fact, as Hutton later wrote so beguilingly, it showed “no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.” An unconformity such as Hutton’s, with its uptilted and eroded graywacke resting directly below the more horizontal layer of gently sloping red sandstone laid down sixty-five million years later, is both a seam and a rupture: a juxtaposition that reveals a cleft that can’t be closed. After my sisters died, I was preoccupied by the Standing Stones at Callanish, a famous Neolithic monument on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Franki had lived beside these stones for several years in the 1970s, and they towered over my memories of her. Four years older than me, by her early twenties my sister had staked out her place on the planet: a chain-smoking, back-to-the-land, queer feminist photographer, a bundle of contradictions (like most of us), and a powerful force in my life. Franki had little interest in the Callanish stones and scorn for the people who made the journey so far north to see them. But I was young enough to be susceptible to all experience and would climb the hill behind her house to walk among the monoliths, touch their surfaces, and strain to understand them. It was only many years later, in June 2010, that I rode the ferry across the Minch to Stornoway and drove up to Calanais, as it was now known, one of several journeys in northern landscapes I describe here, encounters with people, places, and things which helped me recognize that, although my sisters’ deaths were only minor horrors in the history of the world, for those closest to them even minor horrors transform all that follows; that the world’s great horrors, too, are composed of personal loss and unresolved grief; that even the most solid, ancient, and elemental materials are as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself; and that life is filled with unconformities—revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding; holes that relentlessly draw in human investigation and imagination yet refuse to conform, heal, or submit to explanation in ways we might desire or think we need. Sometimes the gaps are too wide, the people, the animals, the objects, the worlds too gone, the time too much for the little time we have. Adrift on a sleepless night, it can feel vertiginous, an abyss of infinity. But then I leave my apartment and head down to the packed morning subway and rattle along below Broadway crammed between all these New York bodies, all this human warmth and possibility, this intimate, reassuring connection to the city and the planet and to everything and all of us passing through.
 
MARBLE
 
From Dyckman Street to the top of Manhattan Island, the subway, open-aired, clatters over a thick layer of Inwood marble, the third of the city’s great bedrock formations.
 
Manhattan schist. Fordham gneiss. And Inwood marble—a five-hundred-million-year-old seam that stretches from North Carolina to Vermont. Inwood marble is a soft dolomite limestone, coarse, porous, and prone to a fatal granulation called sugaring. Too soft to withstand the city’s winters and acid rain, too coarse to compete commercially with the marble from Vermont, resilient and creamy, that arrived on the new railways and forced New York City’s last marble quarries out of business by the mid-1840s. The train clatters to the northwesternmost point of Manhattan. Or is it the southwesternmost point of the Bronx?
 
Everything builds up, breaks down, builds up. This limestone, afterlife of countless sea creatures come to rest on the floor of the ancient Iapetus Ocean, is soluble in even mildly acidic water. It was this obliging quality that allowed Spuyten Duyvil Creek to carve a path past the peak of Manhattan and for the Hudson, Harlem, and East River waters to circle the island through their flooded valleys. And it was this same pliancy that let the United States Army Corps of Engineers open the Harlem Ship Canal around the southern foot of Marble Hill in 1895, blasting a half-million tons of rubble for a channel four hundred feet wide and eighteen feet deep, briefly turning this tip of Manhattan into a fifty-two-acre island of its own at the tip of Broadway and granting large vessels swift passage from the East River to the Hudson and from there to the Erie Canal and the wide-open markets of the American West.
 
Two decades after opening the ship canal, the engineers returned. With the landfill excavated from the new channel, they buried Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and with it the original King’s Bridge built by Frederick Philipse in 1693 to reach his vast new estate—the Philipsburg Manor that covered fifty-two thousand acres of the Bronx and Westchester County. Philipse built his bridge across the shallow Wading Place that the Lenape Indians had used for probably a very long time, and he did so in an era when, even though it was still fields and forest in every direction, the newly emerging colonial aristocracy and its political allies were busy grabbing what they could of this fertile land and parceling out the future. The independent-minded settler-farmers of the late-seventeenth-century rural Bronx refused to pay Philipse’s toll to carry their produce to the burgeoning town in Lower Manhattan, prompting the construction of the toll-free Dyckman Bridge at what is now 225th Street, a second dry route from Manhattan to the American mainland. By November 1783, when George Washington marched over the King’s Bridge to end the seven-year British occupation of New York, old man Philipse was long gone, his Loyalist descendants dispossessed of their lands and their many slaves by the Revolutionary War. New York City was now the capital of the new United States, but Broadway above what is now 170th Street was known as Kingsbridge Road, and it followed the last section of the Lenape trail that once wound its way from near Twenty-third Street up through Manhattan and across the Wading Place into the Bronx, a trail that itself followed an earlier route beaten by the forest animals who once also made corridors across this country.
You might think that in casting off Marble Hill and docking it with the Bronx in 1895, the Corps of Engineers had put to rest the neighborhood’s attachment to Manhattan. But a connection like that outruns both geography and logic. Yes, the ZIP code and area code for Marble Hill are the Bronxian 10463 and 718. Yes, its fire, police, and sanitation services...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804197997
ISBN 13 
9780804197991
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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