One might expect a book titled Deep Time: A Literary History to trace the ramifications of geological time through a series of literary works. Noah Heringman’s ambitious and erudite study does something far more transformative. It shows how the spatial metaphor of “deep time,” often credited (wrongly, Heringman points out) to John McPhee’s Basin and Range (1981), rests on an extensive history of literary and linguistic endeavors to reckon with earthly timescales through metaphor, analogy, and other imaginative proxies. In the process, Heringman’s study affirms that the history of ideas is literary history insofar as efforts to conceptualize and document Earth’s age—itself anything but a human invention—depend on the strategies that writers use to describe and refine their ideas. Thus, rather than trace a scientific concept through a literary archive, Heringman demonstrates that Earth’s deep history is literary first and geological second.
In the canonical account, exemplified by Stephen Jay...
