The Basin kept many different kinds of time, and not all of them were slow. I had seen quickness there too: the sudden drop of a raven in flight, the veer of water round a rock, the darts of the damselflies, the midges who were born, danced and died in a single day. But it was the great chronologies of its making – the ice’s intentless progress seawards, down the slope of time – which had worked upon my mind most powerfully. To be in the Basin, even briefly, is to be reminded of the narrow limits of human perception, of the provisionality of your assumptions about the world. In such a place,
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