Stone

In the MIT museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is (or used to be) a little whirring sculpture comprising an electric motor, a gear train, and a cube of concrete. The motor spins at two hundred revolutions per minute; the pairs of gears and worms scale the rotation down by 1/50th at each step, so that the final wheel in the sequence will make one revolution every two trillion years. That wheel is embedded in the concrete block. 

The sculpture was made by Arthur Ganson, who named it Machine with Concrete.

Somewhere along the gear train you can find some recognisable scaling of your own life, a wheel which turns over once every 35 years. The next wheel along turns over at a little under once every 2,000 years, and the one beyond that, once every 87,000 years. Between two and three turns of the first, and you are done; a turn of the next, and most human settlements are done; beyond that, there is all of human history, settled and unsettled. Done.

So you stand in front of it, this Promethean model of the cosmos, for a moment or two. And allow it to settle your heart a little.

But then, two trillion years, against eternity, is a grain of sand on the beach. Even that block of concrete is thrumming with warmth and life and movement compared with the abyss into which it, and you, will soon enough tumble.

A thought which should petrify you. But thought, paradoxically, is fleet, mobile, unstable, unsettleable; and life is insistent. The moment passes. You smile at the conceit. And then pause in front of it, in spite of yourself. 

...

If, standing there in the museum, you were to glance back over your shoulder, along the route of geared settlements stretching over the North Atlantic which you have followed, whirring, to this place, you will find any number of great stones, rooting you. Standing stones. Neolithic houses. Axes in glass cases. Back there, apparently immobile. A whole age of stone, trillion-geared.

Take, for instance, Maeshowe.

Maeshowe is the most famous late Neolithic chambered tomb, and one of the largest on Orkney. It stands, a grassy hump, just a few fields away from the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar beyond the little isthmus between the lochs.

It is usually dated to around 2800 BC.  The empty stone chamber at its heart—no human or animal remains were found there, when it was opened—is made of beautifully dressed flagstone between colossal orthostats.  

The entrance of the tomb is aligned with a standing stone, the Barnhouse Stone, and beyond that with the setting sun of the winter solstice. On a clear day in midwinter, the last sunlight shines over the standing stone and along the fifty-foot passage leading to the central chamber, and illuminates the bare back wall.

How often could you hope to see a midwinter sunset in a Neolithic lifetime? Once? Twice? You might be lucky and live longer; or you might be lucky and see it one, two, three years in a row. But each time you saw it, you would regard it as a revelation, and as probably the last one you would ever experience. A singular happening, in a whirring multiplication of happenings.

...

One of the great Orkney stones is carved with spirals. It is housed in the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall (although it used to lie in the Westray Visitor Centre, which is where I first saw it), a stone decorated with a spiral designs like those at Newgrange in Ireland. It is known as the Westray Stone, and was found in the Pierowall quarry. Originally part of a tomb, but subsequently incorporated into an Iron Age broch, and now a museum piece, it has turned over several lives already.

And those spirals. They look like the petrified furrows of a millennial gear, turning slowly. A torsion of stone, if that were possible. Some Neolithic craftsman perhaps felt our presence out up here on the cold surface of the earth, from deep in his stone world, and kindly anchored our gear train for us in the lintel he was settling in place. He stood in their flagstone spiral doorway of some midwinter tomb and looked out over the green fields to the setting sun; just a single sun in a dazzling repetition of endlessly turning setting suns; and beyond that solitary sun he looked out over the grey circulating currents of ocean to where a middle-aged man was standing over a whirring gear train, his hair curling slightly in the vortex of trillion-year eternity, waiting for a two-trillion-year gear to furrow up its concrete housing once, or twice, or a trillion times.

He has time. It is ineradicable. We all have time.