The Abyss of Time: Romantic Geology of the Earth and the Mind

Questions about time fill contemporary science fiction films and novels, indeed, they raise startling questions about the age of the universe, time's relativity as described by Einstein, the possibility of travel through galactic space and even through time itself. At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, there appears an overwhelming interest in our culture in pondering what time is, its progress--if one can speak of it in such terms--and its implications for human history, our future and even our minds. Yet we are the not first century to grapple with problems of time's vastness and its ephemeral quality that leaves us hardly able to define what it really is, all the while realizing that the perception of time passing dominates our every waking moment. It was Immanuel Kant in the 18th-century Enlightenment who said that time is a necessary aspect of our ability to have any perceptions at all. And it is this era to which I would like to turn in order to explore the implications of the abyss of time both in terms of earth history and the human mind, for it is this era when a major yet relatively underappreciated scientific revolution was beginning: the recognition based on empirical evidence that our earth is far, far older than the biblical 6,000 years.

In this talk, I present texts of early geology from the romantic era at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, as scientists begin to describe an expanded sense of time, in relation to several literary texts that portray provacative issues of time. In the first part, I discuss the so-called "Father of Geology," James Hutton and his 1795 Theory of the Earth, in which he describes time as an endless series of cycles with "no vestige of a beginning,--no prospect of an end" as well as more theologically-minded scientists who interpret the physical evidence of changes to the surface of the earth as being primarily caused by the one great Deluge that marks the short yet linear progress of time. Each of these two sides bases its argument on cerain assumptions about the age of the earth, whether mere thousands or rather hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. In the second part, I think about these geologists' suggestions for the shape of time, whether it is, as Stephen J. Gould puts it. "Time's Arrow," or "Time's Cycle", and how these notions of time play themselves out in debates about biblical time as well as in literary analyses of the time-boundedness of human consciousness. Finally, in the third part, I look at several well-known German romantic novellas and novels from Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Friedrich von Eichendorff and E.T.A. Hoffmann, in which there are what I call "slippages of time." These slippages are very close to modern science fiction stories where entrance into a certain spatial realm allows, or results in, alterations in the passage of time. I close with speculations on how these early reactions to what we now term "deep time" resonate in our contemporary contemplations of our place in the universe.