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TO SEE THE EARTH BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD
- Wesleyan University Press
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3 TO SEE THE EARTH BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD People are grabbing at the chance to see the earth before the end of the world, the world’s death piece by piece each longer than we. Some endings of the world overlap our lived time, skidding for generations to the crash scene of species extinction the five minutes it takes for the plane to fall, the mile ago it takes to stop the train, the small bay to coast the liner into the ground, the line of title to a nation until the land dies, the continent uninhabitable. That very subtlety of time between large and small Media note people chasing glaciers in retreat up their valleys and the speed . . . watched ice was speed made invisible, now— it’s days, and a few feet further away, a subtle collapse of time between large and our small human extinction. If I have a table at this event, mine bears an ice sculpture. Of whatever loss it is it lasts as long as ice does until it disappears into its polar white and melts and the ground beneath it, into vapor, into air. All that once chased us and we chased to a balance chasing back, tooth for spear, knife for claw, locks us in this grip we just now see our own lives taken by taking them out. Hunting the bear, we hunt the glacier with the changes come of that choice. ...