The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Strata: The Consolations and Invitations of Deep Time

By Maria Popova

Strata: The Consolations and Invitations of Deep Time

“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite… and I know the amplitude of time,” wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what stone teaches about trusting time.

It tempers your sorrows to know that the striking red pebble you pick up at the beach is hematite — the oxidation of iron in sedimentary rock, the same iron composing the hemoglobin that oxygenates your red blood cells; to know that some distant day across the eons, someone else will bend down wonder-smitten on some other beach to pick up a striking pebble laced with red that was once your blood. It is more than a comfort — it is a consecration. The word “holy” shares its Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things. This is the sacred, this the holy. To feel part of the implicate order of the whole. To touch for a moment the wrist of the world, feel the pulse of life’s bloodstream coursing through it, feel yourself a corpuscle and a miracle.

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth,” wrote Rachel Carson. To know that you carry sediment in your cells and that you will return to sediment is to be a living poem.

Rock formation in Patagonia

Laura Poppick offers a wondrous portal into this deeper dimension of time in Strata: Stories from Deep Time (public library) — a fine belated addition to my favorite books of 2025.

Recounting a revelatory shift in perspective while hiking Wyoming’s Bighorn Canyon under the weight of the world’s ecological and political tumult, she writes:

As I sat on that pale plateau with my legs beneath me… I remembered that stability has come and gone and returned so many times before now. That geologic timescales arc too wide to witness in a single human lifetime, but have always spun toward some sort of new stasis. I knew this didn’t let us off the hook, or mean that it was time to stop righting our wrongs to the environment. The changes we have unleashed today are unfolding far faster than past periods of change, and they were not geologically inevitable. We are the agents of this geologic moment. But the strata reminded me that we are also part of the Earth system, this much larger web of connections that thread between the atmosphere, continents, water, ice, and life. That these threads slacken and tighten over time and accommodate for one another with more brilliance than the human mind can easily grasp. That we live within this system, and the system lives within us. We carry its iron in our blood and its stardust in our bones, and its strength is our strength because we are it.

We are it, but we are not a given. The only given is the change and the sphere that contains it.

To apprehend the sphere stills the suffering of separateness. Echoing John Muir’s insistence that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Poppick paints the sphere in its dazzling, tessellated completeness:

Air, rock, water, life, and ice all interact in the web of feedback loops that geoscientists call the Earth system. Together, the five facets of this system — the atmosphere (air), lithosphere (rock), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (life), and cryosphere (ice) — orchestrate the global climate and, in turn, the underpinnings of our lives. It’s by coming to understand this system that I have grown to see the physical world not as the static backdrop of our daily experience but as an ever-changing vessel that ripples and responds to innumerable changes, and has been doing so for billions of years. Over time, these subtle transformations build, erode, and rebuild the world anew. We live our lives within recycled landscapes and those recycled landscapes live within us.

I mean this literally, not figuratively. The science is the poem and the poem is the science. Everything on this planet connects with everything else, from the microscopic contents of the air we breathe to the macroscopic movements of continents and ocean currents. You can’t build a mountain range without changing the atmosphere, at least a little (because freshly sculpted mountains pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and you can’t change the atmosphere without changing the chemistry of the ocean (because oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide), and you can’t change the ocean without affecting the life within it.

Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print.)

Paradoxically, to contact all this change, to see in silt the memorial of mountains and in mountains the memory of the Earth, is to remember the eternity in you. Recounting a rainy visit to a “golden spike” — an outcrop whose strata represent the transition from one geological period to another — Poppick writes:

The traces of the early Cambrian sat unblinking beneath the rain, telling us with a wordless wisdom that there are beginnings and that there are ends and that the fibers of the planet will always harden and soften and dissolve and re-form anew. That our own legacy will, some day, erode back into the sea.

[…]

The gift of geology is the chance to seek refuge in this constancy, in the gravity of the arc of time. When I walk the rocky shoreline near my home, I don’t see random stones thrown about but a montage of stories and events that intertwine directly with our present and our future.

[…]

If there’s one thing we can say with certainty has remained constant since at least the Archean, it’s the persistent tug of water against rock and the erosion that comes with it. The breaking down of Earth’s skin and bones to make room for something new. The motion is at once unchanging and the most persistent force of change. It is carving down boulders into cobbles into pebbles into sands, silts, clays. It is turning land into dust and sending its debris back to the sea it came from. By the time the seafloors of today rise up above the oceans as cliffsides or mountaintops, our individual lives will be specks of dust, imperceptible to the naked eye. The iron in our blood will have pooled back into the earth, all our remains melting within the mantle where we will meet, again, as one.

Complement Strata with geologist turned psychologist Ruth Allen on the twelve kinds of time and geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s love letter to the wisdom of rocks, then revisit Oliver Sacks on deep time and the interconnectedness of the universe.

BP

How to Hold on to the Light of the World

By Maria Popova

The light was always there — our star is a hundred million years older than our planet — but it was learning to see it, to harness it, to transform it, that made this rocky planet a living world: photoreceptors converting sunlight to sugar to green the Earth, eyes co-evolving with consciousness to give us books and beauty and blue.

Divination for the First Light. (Available as a print and a postcard.)

On the smallest daily scale of our tiny transient lives, our experience of life still hinges on how we see the light of the world and how we refract it through the lens of the mind.

The light of sunrise streaming through the rustling leaves of the maple to cast a dancing flame on your kitchen floor.

The glowing blade of grass backlit by the late-morning light.

The light of sunset on the smiling face of the person you don’t yet know, yet know, will become your lover.

The ten thousand flickering lights you see when you are landing home, each a human life both unaware of and indivisible from all the others.

Art by Sarah Jacoby from The Coziest Place on the Moon.

Midway through the lyrical record of her pioneering expedition to Labrador, Mina Hubbard (April 15, 1870–May 4, 1956) breaks into what can best be described as part prose poem reverencing the light, part prayer for a way of seeing that never loses sight of it:

Sometimes towards evening in dreary November, when the clouds hang heavy and low, covering all the sky, and the hills are solemn and sombre, and the wind is cold, and the lake black and sullen, a break in the dark veil lets through a splash of glorious sunshine. It is so very beautiful as it falls into the gloom that your breath draws in quick and you watch it with a thrill. Then you see that it moves towards you. All at once you are in the midst of it, it is falling round you and seems to have paused as if it meant to stay with you and go no farther. While you revel in this wonderful light that has stopped to enfold you, suddenly it is not falling round you any more, and you see it moving steadily on again, out over the marsh with its bordering evergreens, touching with beauty every place it falls upon, forward up the valley, unwavering, without pause, till you are holding your breath as it begins to climb the hills away yonder. It is gone. The smoke blue clouds hang lower and heavier, the hills stand more grimly solemn and sombre, the wind is cold, the lake darker and more sullen, and the beauty has gone out of the marsh. Then — then it is night. But you do not forget the Light. You know it still shines — somewhere.

Couple with a blind hero of the French resistance on how to live in light, then revisit Oliver Sacks on how love gilds the light of life.

BP

The Trouble with Love

By Maria Popova

The Trouble with Love

Two centuries ago, a small group of brilliant and troubled young people trembling with the unprocessed traumas of their childhoods laid in their poems and letters and journals the foundational modern mythos of love. Although none but one of them lived past their thirties, they touched the lives of generations to come with their art and their ideas about life.

We call them the Romantics, keep quoting their poems in our vows and keep paging through their textbook for suffering.

Pulsating through our culture as unexamined dogma is their idea that there is a hierarchy of the affections and that romantic love sits at the top as the organizing principle of our emotional lives, the aim and the end of our existential longing. It is a religion that even people with extraordinary capacity for critical thinking in other domains of life tend not to question. And yet when we let our hearts be large enough and real enough, we discover that there is but a porous and permeable membrane between friendship and passion, that collaboration is a form of intimacy, that family can mean many different things and look many different ways; we discover that romantic love is overwhelmingly a relation not between complete human beings but between idealized selves and mutual projections — the most powerful prompt for fantasy the creative imagination has invented.

Illustration from An ABZ of Love

The Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) offers a sobering antidote to the cult of romantic love in a passage from The Book of Disquiet (public library) — the posthumously published masterpiece that also gave us Pessoa on how to be a good explorer in the lifelong expedition to yourself and how to unself into who you really are. He writes:

Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along.

But every suit, since it isn’t eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we’ve formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through.

Romantic love is thus a path to disillusion, unless this disillusion, accepted from the start, decides to vary the ideal constantly, constantly sewing new suits in the soul’s workshops so as to constantly renew the appearance of the person they clothe.

The standard romantic model is in this sense a warping of the deepest, truest kind of love — the kind Iris Murdoch so perfectly defined as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real… the discovery of reality.” Romantic love, Pessoa observes, is the flight from reality into fantasy, the projection of oneself onto the other:

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept — our own selves — that we love.

[…]

The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say “I love you” or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.

Couple with Iris Murdoch on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Martha Nussbaum’s superb litmus test for how to know whether you really love a person and Simone de Beauvoir on how two souls can interact with one another in a meaningful way.

BP

Saved by Wonder: The Ziegler Polar Expedition and the Aurora Borealis

By Maria Popova

In August 1905, while Mina Hubbard was mapping Labrador in her pioneering expedition, the Brooklyn Eagle reported one of the most “remarkable exploits in Arctic work” — a relief expedition to rescue the American explorer Anthony Fiala and his crew, who had been stranded in the icy expanse for nearly two years, attempting to reach the North Pole.

Bankrolled by the American industrialist William Ziegler, who had made his fortune on baking powder and vowed to spend it on funding as many efforts as it takes to reach the North Pole, Fiala’s three-masted ship was crushed by polar ice just four months after sailing from Norway. Although the America could no longer sail, the ice was so think that the ship didn’t sink but froze in place.

The America in its icy clench.

The men scrambled to salvage the cargo, but when another storm finally swallowed the wreck in January, most of their provisions and coal vanished with it.

They fled onto the ice cap, built a camp, and undertook the daily task of survival, but not before erecting an observatory and setting up all of their scientific instruments.

The days bled into weeks, into months, into seasons as they kept hoping for rescue. The few remaining provisions ran out. They subsisted on walrus and bear. All the while, they kept making observations. It kept their spirits from sinking, this stubborn, steadfast work of painting a portrait of that alien world in numbers and figures in order to reveal the full face of this one.

In what seems like a miracle in the history of polar exploration, only one of the thirty-five men would die in the twenty months they spent as captives of the ice.

The Ziegler expedition at latitude 82°N, March 1905

Although their time in the Arctic was relegated to the sidelines of history as a failed expedition by the measure of its patron’s stated goal of reaching the North Pole, I see it as a triumph of both science and the human spirit. While conquest is a finite game, played for the pleasure of the win, curiosity is an infinite game, played for the pleasure of finding things out, in Richard Feynman’s lovely phrase. Exploration in the service of learning is always far greater and more enduring than exploration in the service of at staking a flag in the name of a potentate, for the task of knowledge is unfinishable and endlessly rewarding. (“The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power!” wrote the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell the year Anthony Fiala was born. “We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.”)

Two years after their rescue, the expedition’s chief scientist — William J. Peters, whose groundbreaking studies of geomagnetism shaped the present understanding of Earth’s magnetosphere — published a 630-page report of their scientific findings. Fiala himself wrote the introduction, urging the reader to imagine the conditions, unimaginable to most of us, under which the work was done — a beckoning that feels like a miniature manifesto for the animating spirit of science:

The difficulties encountered in the execution of work in the Polar Regions must be experienced in order to be properly appreciated. Storms are frequent in the winter, and observers, in going to and from observatories and instrument shelters, have often to crawl upon hands and knees in the face of high winds, whirling snow particles, low temperatures, and in the darkness of winter. The hearty and unselfish cooperation of all concerned is amply indicated by the execution of the great amount of detail work that is reported upon in this volume.

Among the endless tables of astronomical, meteorological, and tidal data is a series of meticulous observations of the aurora borealis spanning several months — a landmark contribution to the poetic science of our planet’s most magical phenomenon. Three of the nights — December 23, 1903, January 2, 1904, and January 23, 1904 — appear as a series of breathtaking plates that capture both the drama and its subtlety of the Northern Lights.

Aurora borealis, December 23, 1903
Aurora borealis, January 2, 1904
Available as a print.
Aurora borealis, January 23, 1903
Aurora borealis sequence, January 23, 1903. Available as a print and a clock.

Couple with Frederick Cook’s moving account of surviving the icy captivity of the other pole, then revisit the science of how the aurora borealis casts its spell.

HT Romance of Books

BP

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