Sonata for Bassoon and Piano – Deep Time

Abstract

While viewing a strata unconformity at Siccar Point in 1788, when geology was first emerging as a science, John Playfair wrote: "The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time." In 1981, John McPhee coined the phrase 'deep time': "Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years-fifty thousand, fifty million-will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis." In 2019, Robert McFarland commented on both in his book, Underland: "McPhee and Playfair's phrases both evoke a temporal vertigo. For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead..