Abyss of Time

As a child, the deep end of the swimming pool terrified me. At the shallow end, I could stand on the bottom with my head still safely above the surface. I swam with confidence and pleasure. The deep end, however, was a different matter. Lettering painted on the rim of the pool -- say, 9' 6" -- filled me with dread. Down by more than double my height, the pool drain possessed, I imagined, a gravitational sucking force. Were I to swim over it, surely, it would drag me under, as irresistibly as if pulled beneath by the tentacles of an octopus. A watery death awaited, my toes caught and entangled in the drain's grates. Of that, the child I was had no doubt.

The pool's deep end was for me an abyss. In its etymology, the word "abyss" derives from Greek words "a-" (without) and "byssos" (depth), thus bottomless and limitless. Usually it refers to watery, oceanic depths, but it might also suggest a crevasse, chasm, or other terrestrial void. Abyss has a connotation of terror, one coming, I suspect, from the implication that what is bottomless must also be inescapable. Moreover, it is a bottomless below, suggesting a grave, the underworld of Hades or Tartarus, and the oblivion coming with death. Few who visit there ever return to the world of the living on earth's sunny surface [1]. The related word "abysmal" has had, since the early 19th century [2], the additional connotation of a wretchedness into which one falls, for example, "the abysmal conditions of those living on the street." For the Chinese, abyss appears as an interpretation of the water over water, or Pit, hexagram of the I Ching. Other interpretations of that hexagram involve darkness, risk, and concealed danger. Fear of bottomless depths is, evidently, not strictly Western.

I am now reading Claude C. Albritton's book, The Abyss of Time (WH Freeman, 1980). A geologist, Albritton provides a history of the geological discovery of the vastness of earth's time. We might simply call such vastness "deep time". The discovery came slowly, in the successive discoveries made by geologists and others over several hundred years. Time gathered its depth (or, expanse) as these discoveries pushed out estimates of the age of the earth from 6000 years (a date derived nonscientifically by analysis of the Jewish scriptures, Genesis in particular) to today's estimate of 4.6 billion years. This increase of more than 750,000-fold has required adjustment in how we, as mortal humans, understand ourselves as existing in the matrix of time.

Albritton's title, "the abyss of time", originates in the discoveries of James Hutton, one of geology's founders. Hutton came to understand geological processes as slow and inexorable. Given sufficient time, these processes -- no different from those active at this present time -- can raise mountains and cut vast canyons. No Biblical floods or other catastrophic events are needed [3]. Instead, only time, in vast amounts, is required. Consequently, "we find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end," wrote Hutton (Albritton, p. 96). Moreover, "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time" (Albritton, p. 103) wrote John Playfair, Hutton's collaborator and biographer.  Playfair wrote this at Siccar Point, Scotland, the site of a geological unconformity that provided Hutton with his most important insights. But why describe time with the word "abyss" considering it terrifying connotation?

In its new-found vastness, geological time seems to deny our stories of time's beginning, be it the Genesis story or the Big Bang, as well as of time's ending, say, the return of Christ or nuclear winter. Time without beginning and without end consequently loses its unfolding progressive character, becoming more nearly circular and repetitious. Sisyphus, eternally rolling his boulder up the mountain only to have it roll back down, graduates from mere metaphor and mythology. He is a man punished by the gods with futility and imprisoned in the realm of circular time. His fate and its futility are what makes understanding geological time an abyss [4]. 

Endnotes

1. Greek and Roman mythology give special attention to those few mortals who have visited and later returned from the Underworld. These special mortals include Odysseus, Aeneas, Sisyphus, and Orpheus. (Eurydice, beloved by Orpheus, almost made the list.)

2. See "abysmal" in The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories, edited by Glynnis Chantrell, 2002.

3. This doctrine now goes by the name Uniformitarianism.

4. Albert Camus, for one, disagreed. In his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" (ca. 1942), he presented Sisyphus as the modern absurd hero, ending his essay with the words "one must imagine Sisyphus happy". His Sisyphus defies both the gods and the circularity of time. He knows time but not the abyss. I wonder how much Camus knew about geological time.

posted: 2020-03-09, last edited: 2020-03-10 (rewritten)