## Metadata - Author: [[Marcia Bjornerud]] - Full Title: Timefulness - Category: #books ## Highlights - in the logic of economics, in which labor productivity must always increase to justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply take time—education, nursing, or art performance—constitute a problem because they cannot be made significantly more efficient. Playing a Haydn string quartet takes just as long in the twenty-first century as it did in the eighteenth; no progress has been made! This is sometimes called “Baumol’s disease” for one of the economists that first described the dilemma.4 That it is considered a pathology reveals much about our attitude toward time and the low value we in the West place on process, development, and maturation. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSGJKZR&location=205)) - it is time for all the sciences to adopt a geologic respect for time and its capacity to transfigure, destroy, renew, amplify, erode, propagate, entwine, innovate, and exterminate. Fathoming deep time is arguably geology’s single greatest contribution to humanity. Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences. ([Location 265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSGJKZR&location=265)) - Understanding the reasons for the morphology of a particular landscape is similar to the rush of insight one has upon learning the etymology of an ordinary word. A window is opened, illuminating a distant yet recognizable past—almost like remembering something long forgotten. This enchants the world with layers of meaning and changes the way we perceive our place in it. ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSGJKZR&location=288)) - I’ve written this book in the belief (possibly naïve) that if more people understood our shared history and destiny as Earth-dwellers, we might treat each other, and the planet, better. At a time when the world appears more deeply divided than ever by religious dogmas and political animosities, there would seem to be little hope of finding a common philosophy or list of principles that might bring all factions to the table for honest discourse about increasingly intractable environmental, social, and economic problems. But the communal heritage of geology may yet allow us to reframe our thinking about these issues in a fresh new way. In fact, natural scientists already serve as a kind of impromptu international diplomatic corps who demonstrate that it is possible for people from developed and developing countries, socialist and capitalist regimes, theocracies and democracies to co-operate, debate, disagree, and move toward consensus, unified by the fact that we are all citizens of a planet whose tectonic, hydrologic, and atmospheric habits ignore national boundaries. Maybe, just maybe, the Earth itself, with its immensely deep history can provide a politically neutral narrative from which all nations may agree to take counsel. ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSGJKZR&location=294)) - To my surprise, I found that geology demanded a type of whole-brain thinking I hadn’t encountered before. It creatively appropriated ideas from physics and chemistry for the investigation of unruly volcanoes and oceans and ice sheets. It applied scholarly habits one associates with the study of literature and the arts—the practice of close reading, sensitivity to allusion and analogy, capacity for spatial visualization—to the examination of rocks. Its particular form of inferential logic demanded mental versatility and a vigorous but disciplined imagination. And its explanatory power was vast; it was nothing less than the etymology of the world. I was hooked. An apt way to describe how geologists perceive rocks and landscapes is the metaphor of a palimpsest—the term used by medieval scholars to describe a parchment that was used more than once, with old ink scraped off to allow a new document to be inscribed. Invariably, the erasure was imperfect, and vestiges of the earlier text survived. These remnants can be read using x-rays and various illumination ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSGJKZR&location=340)) - Hutton’s original epiphany that the age of the earth was effectively infinite compared with human lifespans arose from his recognition that the unconformity at Siccar Point represented the time needed for a mountain belt to form and be beveled again to a flat plain. ([Location 928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07CSGJKZR&location=928))