An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Author:Ben Fergusson [Fergusson, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780349142579
Google: 15N1DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0349142572
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2019-07-03T23:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

What I’d said to my mother about James Hutton was true. In Britain, writers tend to overstate the primacy of Hutton, ignoring the long history of geological discoveries in France, Germany, Hungary and Russia, with their traditions of mining and mining academies, churning out incredible fossils for centuries. When Wordsworth bemoaned the explosion of amateur geologists hacking at the rocks of the Lake District in search of substances known ‘by some barbarous name’, those names – greywacke, schist, gneiss – were all German.

To give Mum her due, though, it’s impossible not to be won over by the romance of Hutton, John Playfair and Sir James Hall bobbing in the sea at Siccar Point in Berwickshire, as Hutton’s hunch solidified in their minds that the earth had not been created in a single moment by the hand of God some six millennia ago, but billions and billions of years before. ‘The mind seemed to grow giddy,’ Playfair said, ‘by looking so far into the abyss of time.’

One of the most passionate groups of amateur geologists was vicars, like Reverend William Conybeare and Reverend William Buckland, trying desperately to find in geology proof of the great flood that God had once sent to engulf the earth. Instead, they had to watch as the waters ebbed further and further away. I can imagine the nauseating anxiety that these men felt, trying to fit their newly gained knowledge to their old worldview, confidently exclaiming how each discovery proved their thesis, but feeling the constant contradictions as a persistent anxious pain in the stomach.

It was a pain I also felt in the last weeks of that summer. Sitting at the dinner table with my family, turning sausages on the grill at the beer garden, sunk into a beanbag in Stefan’s bedroom, I could pontificate passionately about how me staying in Berlin for one more year made complete sense, how I was too young anyway, and how I needed the money now I was going to study in London. I could even cycle to Oz’s apartment, have sex with him on the rough rug of his living-room floor and tell the same stories to the crown of his head as he lay on top of me stroking my bare leg. But through all of this, I was plagued by a chronic anxiety, a sense that I was about to lose my grip on something. And it came out physically. An itchy rash appeared on the back of my hand and every week or so I would get a blistering headache. At night, I would suddenly wake up as if someone had called my name, and then wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again for an hour or more.

I felt as if a void had opened up around me. I realised that up until that point I’d always felt as if my life was following a clear course, but Oz had revealed the giddy multiplicity of lives that I might live, of people that I might be.

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