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75a10d1
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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.
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John McPhee |
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aec9193
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When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to..
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geology
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John McPhee |
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b720675
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The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already ..
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wonder
science
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John McPhee |
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1fae29b
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In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.
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John McPhee |
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0c1eb6c
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Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year's Southern Conference champion, from the NCAA championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of the..
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hard-work
practice
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John McPhee |
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91797ed
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The routine produces. But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave. I simply don't want to break through that membrane. I'd do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don't want to go there because there's so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to sta..
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John McPhee |
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d7d6219
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I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes.
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John McPhee |
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03d6623
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going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside--to say, 'This is the way it was.'
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John McPhee |
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7ac5a76
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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.
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earth
science
deep-time
geoscience
geology
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John McPhee |
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c5c29d3
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No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing.
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John McPhee |
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fb78940
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A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there.
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John McPhee |
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f57d09a
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The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.
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John McPhee |
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7072787
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Some miners' wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes.
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John McPhee |
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69f1ffd
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Despite the recurrence of events in which the debris-basin system fails in its struggle to contain the falling mountains, people who live on the front line are for the most part calm and complacent. It appears that no amount of front-page or prime-time attention will ever prevent such people from masking out the problem.
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los-angeles
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John McPhee |
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e9d4892
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We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad.
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John McPhee |
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d39ff5f
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He said, "Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It's not, if you're mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater."
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John McPhee |
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ae90743
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Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet.
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John McPhee |
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c66859a
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If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker's son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother's championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym an..
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hard-work
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John McPhee |
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db0529d
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Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.
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John McPhee |
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c322bd8
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It doesn't matter that something you've done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.
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John McPhee |
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80e7c9f
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I'd much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk.
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John McPhee |
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f9e9b02
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A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes--in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled an..
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time
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John McPhee |
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c017bf4
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It has been Anita's style as a geologist to begin with an outcrop and address herself to history from there--to begin with what she can touch, and then to reason her way back through time as far as she can go. A river conglomerate, as tangible rock, unarguably presents the river. The river speaks of higher ground. The volume of sediment that the river has carried can imply a range of mountains. To find Precambrian jaspers in the beds of you..
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John McPhee |
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c8377b1
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On each of two porches lie big chunks of serpentine--smooth as talc, mottled black and green. When you see rocks like that on a porch, a geologist is inside.
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John McPhee |
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f83a5c8
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On his way home, Giberson met the Devil himself at a bridge. The Devil told him to play his violin, and while Giberson played the Devil danced. Then the Devil played the violin while Giberson danced. Giberson was the kind of dancer of whom people said things like "I seen him put a looking glass on the floor and dance on it--he was that light when he danced." But the Devil danced even more lightly and beautifully than Giberson, and the Devil..
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John McPhee |
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2364257
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I'm addicted to the entire planet. I don't want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells...
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nature
science
david-brower
john-mcphee
shells
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John McPhee |
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7d2aa94
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A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of..
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sierra-club
nature-writing
conservation
development
environment
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John McPhee |
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68b0d45
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On April 1, 1865, in Virginia, Pickett was defending an intersection known as Five Forks, six miles south of the Appomattox River and a good bit closer to the Southside Railroad, the last remaining supply line to Richmond. While thirty thousand Union troops led by Little Phil Sheridan approached from the southeast, Pickett's twelve thousand, spread two miles wide behind fences and in ditches, braced to meet them. Pickett's supreme commander..
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John McPhee |
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88fea03
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In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.
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John McPhee |