Nabokov, in his novel Transparent Things, reflects on the temporal vertigo that can come from the contemplation of the earth’s substance. ‘When we concentrate on a material object,’ he wrote, ‘whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object,’ such that we become ‘not of the now’. Hawkes knew how to become not of the now – how to break the surface tension of the world, and sink into the deep-time dream-life of debris.
