#the second life

[antigonick]

lean back again let me love you let the sun beat

Edwin Morgan, excerpt of “Strawberries”, in The Second Life

[cupidford]

The Second Life by Salambo06

Johnlock Love Letters #1484

[aandrezel]

“Ignoring its geology, I guess I don’t know a paragraph in literature that I prefer to the one Joseph Conrad begins by saying, ‘Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.’ He says, moments later, ‘This stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it anymore; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones.’ Metaphorically, he travelled back to the Carboniferous, when the vegetal riot occurred, but scarcely was that the beginning of the world. The first plants to appear on land, ever, appeared in the Silurian. Through the Ordovician and the Cambrian, there had been no terrestrial vegetation at all. And in the deep shadow below the Cambrian were seven years for every one in all subsequent time. There were four billion years back there—since the earliest beginnings of the world. There were scant to nonexistent fossils. There were the cores of the cratons, the rock of the continental shields, the rock of the surface of the moon. There were the reefs of Witwatersrand. There was the rock that would become the Adirondack Mountains, the Wind River summits, the Seward Peninsula, Manhattan Island. But so little is known of this seven-eights of all history that in a typical two-pound geological textbook there are fourteen pages on Precambrian time. The Precambrian has attracted geologists of exceptional imagination, who see families of mountains in folded schists. Uranium-lead, rubidium-strontium, and potassium-argon radiometric dating have helped them to sort out their Kenoran, Hudsonian, Grenvillean orogenies, their Aphebian, Hadrynian, Paleohelikian time. Isolating the first two billion years of the life of the earth, they called it the Archean Eon. In the middle Archean, photosynthesis began. Much later in the Precambrian, somewhere in Helikian or Hadrynian time, aerobic life appeared. There is no younger rock in the United States than the travertine that is forming in Thermopolis, Wyoming. A 2.7-billion-year-old outcrop of the core of the continent is at the head of Wind River Canyon, twenty miles away. Precambrian—4,560 to 544 million years before the present.

At the other end of the scale is the Holocene, the past ten thousand years, also called the Recent—Cro-Magnon brooding beside the melting ice. [...] It was at some moment in the Pleistocene that humanity crossed what the geologist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Threshold of Reflection, when something in people ‘turned back on itself and so to speak took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and respresentations; and simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all of this happened for the first time.’ Friars of another sort—evangelists of the environmental movement—have often made use of the geologic time scale to place in perspective that great ‘leap forward’ and to suggest what our reflective capacities may have meant to Mother Earth. David Brower, for example, the founder of the Friends of the Earth and emeritus hero of the Sierra Club, has tirelessly travelled the United States delivering what he himself refers to as ‘the sermon,’ and sooner or later in every talk he invites his listeners to consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been four and a half billion years. In this adjustment, a day equals something like seven hundred and fifty million years, and thus ‘all day Monday and until Tuesday noon creation was busy getting the earth going.’ Life began Tuesday noon, and ‘the beautiful, organic wholeness of it’ developed over the next four days. ‘At 4 P.M. Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight, the human race appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad.’ Brower holds up a photograph of the world—blue, green, and swirling white. ‘This is the sudden insight from Apollo,’ he says. ‘There it is. That’s all. We see through the eyes of the astronauts how fragile our life really is.’ Brower has computed that we are driving through the earth’s resources at a rate comparable to an automobile going a hundred and twenty-eight miles an hour—and he says that we are accelerating.

In like manner, geologists will sometimes use the calendar year as a unit to represent the time scale, and in such terms the Precambrian runs from New Year’s Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas. The last ice sheet melts on December 31st at one minute before midnight, and the Roman Empire lasts five seconds. With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use the repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective—to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time. They often liken humanity’s presence on earth to a brief visitation from elsewhere in space, its luminous, explosive characteristics consisting not merely of the burst of population in the twentieth century but of the whole residence of people on earth—a single detonation, resembling nothing so much as a nuclear implosion with its successive neutron generations, whole generations following one another once every hundred-millionth of a second, temperatures building up into the millions of degrees and stripping atoms until bare nuclei are wandering in electron seas, pressures building up to a hundred million atmospheres, the core expanding at five million miles an hour, expanding in a way that is quite different from all else in the universe, unless there are others who also make bombs.

The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations—two ahead, two behind—with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it. At least, that is what geologists wonder sometimes, and they have imparted the questions to me. They wonder to what extent it is possible to absorb a set of facts and move with them, in a sensory manner, beyond the recording intellect and into the abyssal eons. Primordial inhibition may stand in the way. On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways. They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the thin band in which are the all but indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo, and now. Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.

In geologists’ own lives, the least effect of time is that they think in two languages, function on two different scales.

‘You care less about civilization. Half of me gets upset with civilization. The other half does not get upset. I shrug and think, So let the cockroaches take over.’

‘Mammalian species last, typically, two million years. We’ve about used up ours. Every time Leakey finds something older, I say, ‘Oh! We’re overdue.’ We will be handing the dominant-species-on-earth position to some other group. We’ll have to be clever not to.’

‘A sense of geologic time is the most important thing to suggest to the nongeologists: the slow rate of geologic processes, centimeters per year, with huge effects, if continued for enough years.’

‘A million years is a short time—the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet’s time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.’

‘It didn’t take very long for those mountains to come up, to be deroofed, and to be thrust eastward. Then the motion stopped. That happened in maybe ten million years, and to a geologist that’s really fast.’

‘If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.’”

—John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, 1981

[beenchantd]

Just finished the next chapter to The Second Life! They’re getting closer, I promise ;)

Four years ago, Sherlock had announced his retirement, leaving London for the country side at barely 53, and John had watched him go without a word. But four years is a long time when you spent it away from the person you've been desperately in love with for decades, and John finally decides it's time to pack his things and have the talk they should have had long ago.

[beenchantd]

The Second life

Retirementlock, 5/? 

Four years ago, Sherlock had announced his retirement, leaving London for the country side at barely 53, and John had watched him go without a word. But four years is a long time when you spent it away from the person you’ve been desperately in love with for decades, and John finally decides it’s time to pack his things and have the talk they should have had long ago.

John packs his suitcase on a Friday.

It’s dark outside, the only light in the room coming from the still open window, the flat  deadly silent, and there is a weight on his chest as he folds each item of clothes. He’s been willing himself to fall asleep since he had gone up to bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to find a meaning to the day he was about to start in less than three hours. The same dull, boring day he’d been living for the past year, busying himself in the vain hope to forget about his empty flat, empty bed, empty life.  A few years back, he could have used Rosie as an excuse for his own cowardice to do something about it. He could have pretended she needed him there, either cooking breakfast, walking her to school or, later on, reminding her to wake up in the morning in the first place. In a sense, she had needed him like any child whose life revolves around their parents, but that had ended months ago now, when she had packed her own suitcases and went all the way across the country to study in the best boarding school there was, and he continues to get up everyday wondering what exactly he’s supposed to do now .

I’m retiring, John.

I’m leaving London.

“Stop,” John commands to the silent room, and he doesn’t bother cursing against the too familiar voice in his head. He reaches for the pile of jumpers on the lower shelf, placing them carefully on top of his shirts and finally closing the suitcase. He stares down at it, his fingers shaking and the ache spreading throughout his chest making it hard to breathe.  

I need something different, John.

Something new.

“I said stop,” John breathes, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply. “Just stop.” He lets the silence surrounding him fill his mind again, his breathing slowing and his head spinning just a little less. It’s packed now. He can’t back up, can’t pretend he hasn’t been thinking about leaving this town too full of memories and start new. He can’t do this anymore, can’t fool himself and let time take all he ever wanted from him. Rosie would be the one pushing him out the door if she was here, and John can’t help but smile at the thought. She’s been begging him to leave for weeks, to finally get a grip on himself and do things right. As if it was that easy, John had replied, closing the discussion once again but his energy to fight the inevitable growing weaker.

A car passing through the street startles him, and John looks back down at his closed suitcase, and then the clock on the bedside table. 04:36. He could catch the early train and be there by ten if he hurries, having learned the train schedule years ago. He glances around the room, taking it all in one last time, this room he had hated with all of his being the first time he slept here. The room that had been the silent witness of his dreams for more and his tears when facing reality. Still, he smiles when his gaze stops on the drawing Rosie made when she was five, still spending all of her free time trying to improve her art skills, and decides to pull it off the wall and fold it into the suitcase. Sherlock always loved this drawing. In the end, he only need to reach into his pocket to find the small piece of paper that could have changed his life years ago, the edges frayed and the ink used to write down the address almost dried out.

“I’m coming,” John whispers, silence the only answer to his promise.

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@johnnlocked @yorkiepug @conversationswithjohnlock @lmirandas@daringlydomestic@blueink3 @ladymacphisto @chinike @artfulinanities @missmuffin221@johnandsherlock@beejohnlocked @blanketjohn @bobenlugares @totallysilvergirl @your-holy-nerd @wilde-grrrl @trek-who-lock @chinike @johnsandsherlocks @isu123

[beenchantd]

Already on the verge of falling asleep, Sherlock hears himself say quietly, “You are a mystery, John Watson.” “Am I?” John replies, one finger playing with the curls on his temple. “Hmm,” Sherlock moans, too relaxed to care. “I have no idea what you’re doing.” “I thought it was fairly obvious,” John whispers, and Sherlock can only remain awake long enough to hear the rest of his answer before letting sleep overtake him. “I’m doing it right this time.”

The Second Life, chapter seven

[beenchantd]

Explicit / Chapters: 1/? /Retirementlock

Summary: Four years ago, Sherlock had announced his retirement, leaving London for the country side at barely 53, and John had watched him go without a word. But four years is a long time when you spent it away from the person you've been desperately in love with for decades, and John finally decides it's time to pack his things and have the talk they should have had long ago.

Thank you so much to xtina @johnwatso for reading it first and declaring it was a cursed fic for making her cry.

And of course, thank you to Soggy @astudyinsnoggy for her job as a beta !

@johnnlocked @yorkiepug @conversationswithjohnlock @lmirandas @daringlydomestic@blueink3 @ladymacphisto @chinike @artfulinanities @missmuffin221 @johnandsherlock@beejohnlocked @blanketjohn @bobenlugares @totallysilvergirl @your-holy-nerd @wilde-grrrl @trek-who-lock @chinike @johnsandsherlocks @isu123