Oct 3, 2017 04:25 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magaz...cphee.html
EXCERPT: [...] McPhee has built a career on such small detonations of knowledge. His mind is pure curiosity: It aspires to flow into every last corner of the world, especially the places most of us overlook. Literature has always sought transcendence in purportedly trivial subjects — “a world in a grain of sand,” as Blake put it — but few have ever pushed the impulse further than McPhee.
[...] North America, in McPhee’s telling, is the product of nearly infinite vanished worlds, with species and climates and mountain chains and oceans all lost in the chasms of deep time — so far gone that even the most brilliant geologists are unable to extrapolate all the way back to their original bubbling source.
Everything, for McPhee, is annals of a former world. Even his own work, he is fully aware, will disappear. “The fact is that everything I’ve written is very soon going to be absolutely nothing — and I mean nothing,” he told The Paris Review in 2010. “It’s not about whether little kids are reading your work when you’re 100 years dead or something, that’s ridiculous! What’s 100 years? Nothing.”
And yet McPhee’s work is not melancholy, macabre, sad or defeatist. It is full of life. Learning, for him, is a way of loving the world, savoring it, before it’s gone. In the grand cosmology of John McPhee, all the earth’s facts touch one another — all its regions, creatures and eras. Its absences and presences. Fish, trucks, atoms, bears, whiskey, grass, rocks, lacrosse, weird prehistoric oysters, grandchildren and Pangea. Every part of time touches every other part of time. You just have to find the right structure....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magaz...cphee.html
EXCERPT: [...] McPhee has built a career on such small detonations of knowledge. His mind is pure curiosity: It aspires to flow into every last corner of the world, especially the places most of us overlook. Literature has always sought transcendence in purportedly trivial subjects — “a world in a grain of sand,” as Blake put it — but few have ever pushed the impulse further than McPhee.
[...] North America, in McPhee’s telling, is the product of nearly infinite vanished worlds, with species and climates and mountain chains and oceans all lost in the chasms of deep time — so far gone that even the most brilliant geologists are unable to extrapolate all the way back to their original bubbling source.
Everything, for McPhee, is annals of a former world. Even his own work, he is fully aware, will disappear. “The fact is that everything I’ve written is very soon going to be absolutely nothing — and I mean nothing,” he told The Paris Review in 2010. “It’s not about whether little kids are reading your work when you’re 100 years dead or something, that’s ridiculous! What’s 100 years? Nothing.”
And yet McPhee’s work is not melancholy, macabre, sad or defeatist. It is full of life. Learning, for him, is a way of loving the world, savoring it, before it’s gone. In the grand cosmology of John McPhee, all the earth’s facts touch one another — all its regions, creatures and eras. Its absences and presences. Fish, trucks, atoms, bears, whiskey, grass, rocks, lacrosse, weird prehistoric oysters, grandchildren and Pangea. Every part of time touches every other part of time. You just have to find the right structure....
MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magaz...cphee.html