Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, Alyson Waters Page A

consent. There is something offensive about this instant acceptance. If the greatest grief is so sensible, we can appoint it a judge, it will not lead us astray, we can put ourselves in its hands to let it wisely govern our lives. But I am speaking as an archaeologist oblivious of everything I owe to grave diggers. I am getting carried away by my passion for my job. I want to move too quickly. The minute the dead are inhumed, I want to dig them back up. Patience. It is always too soon to unbury the dead. Never did a paleontologist worthy of his name dig up a dead man. We bring to light fossilized bones, nothing but stone, let’s not get emotional, the dead are no longer there. A skeleton needs living marrow to grow bigger and stronger, but its true adventure, its adventure qua skeleton begins later, slowly, under the right conditions it turns to stone and it’s a crying shame that consciousness cannot participate in the skeleton’sadventure all the way to the end, for it is a wonderful adventure, the kind of adventure consciousness loved, like meditating or remembering, a static adventure regulated by the passing of time with, at the end, peace.
    But we are irremediably, not to say very superficially, creatures of the surface, and it is always difficult for us to admit that history in reality is being determined beneath our feet. For the past (what is putrefied and petrified) and the future (what engenders and endures) are in effect buried: passing time is subterranean. Our senses do not perceive it. Our spirits do not conceive it. All those antennae only give us information about space, or the current moment, that is, today’s weather conditions. We know, however, that the prosperity of a region depends on the resources belowground, and we also know that any history of horology, from the very first ticktock, is meaningless on the scale of time that produces the following riches: quartz, hydrocarbons, diamonds, every ore. I have done a lot of digging in my time, deep digging, I have thrust myself down into the earth like a tree all the while deploring the fact that I cannot travel in every direction at once, unlike the tree that plunges and pushes its roots ever farther, branching them out rather than having to choose between two diverging roads so as to explore them both. I would also have liked to possess the ability to dig in two places simultaneously without having to split myself in two, without separating my blood, with the blind but perfectly controlled perseverance also typical of moles.
    I have often had occasion to see them at work, I know them well, or, let me say in passing, I know the ones who usurp their name – for they are never totally moles, fully moles, absolutely moles, they are missing gloves, mole gloves in order to be one hundred percent moles, entirely moles, worthyof the name “mole” even if, as such, despite their tiny hands that are always clean, they are already almost moles, more mole than any other animal in any case, the shrew for example compared to the mole, the shrew in point of fact is nothing like a mole, the shrew must be redesigned from tail to snout to obtain a mole and that is why, while awaiting the mole with mole fingers, lacking this actual mole, I propose to continue to use the term “mole” for all the pseudomoles, approximate or incomplete, that can give the impression of moleness, they have proved it, and I’ve often had occasion to see them at work, therefore I am very knowledgeable about and I admire and envy their remarkable sense of direction: naturalists are in the habit of slipping a radioactive band onto one of their tiny paws and following their underground movements with a Geiger (Hans, German physicist, born in Neustadt in 1882 and died in Berlin in 1945, for those among you interested in his trajectory) counter. These experiments show that moles navigate very well in their tunnels. They never get lost despite the daily growing complexity of the network; they