| “–of beholding, at one glance, the effects of causes which may have happened at intervals of time incalculably remote, and during which, nevertheless, no local circumstances may have occurred to mark that there is a great chasm in the chronological series of nature’s archives.” –Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology |
| From that distance its rifts and fusions across a theater of inexplicable ages sown in culminations were to establish such a fury should it sweep before it again all evidence of these unbridgeable hiatuses though our knowledge had steered its presence among countless series of worlds and when crushed by a consolidating passage through lost deposits ton upon ton of leaf matter the flesh of beasts leveraged against its resistance seemed to reprove our wanton assumption that illusory and shelving cavities below the mesmerizing juices the earths as to inject a paralysis between successive lifetimes having tempered what annihilation later transmitted were across the displaced cycles such latitudes as thought demarcating its eternally funneling concentricity inward to floes of accumulated affliction whereas their mediate cause had long spread its debris among catastrophes if an uninterrupted metamorphosis be admitted to our picture dominions abandoned to such turbulence that their veins filled with metal and rare for to open an aerial perspective would enclose within the tight bounds of conscious mirage those years be but corals marine shells the teeth and bones of fish left behind the impregnations themselves were to follow upon strata laid down by sensitive lavas and at the adventive threshold time its space-bearing vortices opening the skull shall occasion a rising and sinking of plates their edges marked by amethystine fires while intermixed in a lattice of stellar origin successive coasts those once again deposited in transverse beds or against an alien summons were by torrents swept in advance of atomicity and immensity ceaselessly transposed to have engendered an animate soul balanced on an axle point its alluvial body furrowed with dispersals of stars did beget a sudden expiration snatched from the frame of their coronas as they had risen from below an horizon well hidden the husk field of scattered suns glowing in embers lay beyond conjecture or the ambition proper to minerals and blind perpetuities pressed their flanks whether those perished ages once buried were eventually to reemerge into light and air the hardened feeling effervesces with the ignition of its confinement shall burn entirely if what were insurmountable perplexities reveal a common source now abandoned to this unabated fulfillment than a gaze which to penetrate its dark miracle discovers within an original necessity possessed of neither author nor origin will explain for us why nature’s transmutations achieve but momentary architectures split and founder into rigid bark which emulation to imply a technique of monuments would harden the vegetable realms against all vicissitude as the lizard its imbrications about a central purposelessness none dare accept for the wedge it puts in covenants drawn up in a serpent’s night variously the knots and swollen burls of trees give out that convulsions having spoiled the better part of secular periods themselves do lie cozened away in a fondness without bounds the womb grows full and the day swells in its gourd the Great Year rounding his perfect cheek she joyfully makes her way if along a cliff when against the errant root uplifted brings her foot and stumbles her infant shall plummet to the sea in but a moment the water makes of its placidity a disrupted surface when rises up around the plunging drop a crown-like splash with scalloped peaks shooting out their tiny jets have already broken into that multitude of droplets called spray is one minute bead come finally to rest within a coalescence. | |