For the past week or so, I have been reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a speculative essay concerning the disappearance of human beings from the planet and the routes nature will take to re-establish itself as the primary influence on the topography of the Earth. Weisman suggests that, sooner than we could imagine, the Earth would revert to an entirely green landscape, the immense infrastructure of our cities being undermined and overrun by a combination of water, weather, plant-life and animals. The only thing to betray our existence - a 6 million ton swirling mass of discarded plastic in the North Pacific. Every piece ever made since the 1950's still in existence.
Since I began reading, impermanence haunts my waking hours. As I sleep, imperceptible droplets of water leak between the minute gaps between roof tiles, bloating wooden struts and forming a blackened map of spores in the corners of the bedroom; little by little weakening the entire structure of my house. When I dream, I dream of cracks in plaster, blistering and exposing wounds through which I can see the clearest blue-sky, the same sky that will bear witness to the fall of our buildings, our cities. Us.
In a way I find it reassuring. Geologically speaking, the whole of human history is but a speck within a speck, let alone the life of a single human. Mortgages, jobs, people; everything is transient. The life-cycle of a tree continues year after year, leaves fall, leaves grow, that's all there is. That's all there needs to be. In the same way, buildings are erected, buildings fall. Nothing is important. Everything vanishes.
Except nature.
Nature endures.
I shall keep reading; the future looks interesting, whether anyone is here to see it or not.
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