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August 14, 2026
from Basin and Range
by John McPhee
“You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”
In Basin and Range John McPhee comes up with memorable metaphors for “deep time”, a phrase he coined, and the best-known is our paragraph of the week which he came upon after gazing at a cut in a hillside that revealed many layers of geologic time. His extended metaphor gives us a measure of the time that the planet earth has evolved compared to the brief blip when humans, endowed with a rich consciousness, arrived on the scene.
In the commentary, he goes a step further and asks the question that geologists puzzle over. Is it possible for humans to go beyond merely measuring these eons of time to a felt experience of them. Can they achieve “a kind of companionship with the earth?”
The Paragraph of the Week
If you were to lift your arms and spread them wide and hold them straight out to either side and think of the distance from fingertips to fingertips as representing the earth's entire history, then you would have all the principal events in that hillside in the middle of the palm of one hand... [L]ook at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian [era] begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use these repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective—to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time.
—John McPhee
Commentary of Various Geologists
“The human mind may not have evolved enough to comprehend deep time,” John McPhee writes. “It may only be able to measure it. At least that is what geologists wonder some times.” Then, without giving their names, McPhee quotes some of them in a passage that reads like the voice of the compound ghost of geology:
“A sense of geologic time is the most important thing to suggest to the nongeologist: the slow rate of geologic processes, centimetres per year, with huge effects, if continued for enough years.”
“A million years is a short time—the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”
“It didn't take very long for those mountains to come up, to be deroofed, and to be thrust eastward. Then the motion stopped. That happened in maybe ten million years, and to a geologist that's really fast.”
“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”
—John McPhee et al.
This Visible Speaking
Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called This Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
