Underground Quotes

“The underground teaches us to respect mystery. We live in a world obsessed with illumination, where we blaze our floodlights over every secret, strive to reveal every furrow, to root out every last trace of darkness, as though it were a kind of vermin. In our connection to subterranean space, we ease our suspicion of the unknown, and recognize that not everything should be revealed, not all the time. The underground helps us accept that there will always be lacunae, always blind spots. It reminds us that we are disorderly, irrational creatures, susceptible to magical thinking and flights of dreaming and bouts of lostness, and that these are our greatest gifts. The underground reminds us of what our ancestors always knew, that there is forever power and beauty in the unspoken and unseen.”
― Will Hunt, Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet

“My thoughts earthwormed down inside my body, chewing through my inner architecture. It was the feeling of being peeled open, turned inside out. I felt the rhythmic clenching of my heart, my lungs ballooning inside my ribs, my epiglottis flapping open and shut. In the absence of sight, my other senses bloomed. The sound of the stream, which I’d barely noticed when I entered the cave, now filled the whole chamber, unfurling in effusive patterns. Smells—mud, damp limestone—thickened to the point of feeling material. I could taste the cave.”
― Will Hunt, Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet

“By Gold’s model, the intraterrestrials—the oxygen-allergic, heat-loving, rock-eating darkness-lovers—were not a mysterious offshoot of us surface-dwellers. They came first: we were the offshoot of them. With that, Gold submitted an entirely new scene in our creation story: after millions of years gestating down inside the warm earth, a cluster of archaic microbes split off from the rest of the underworld inhabitants and slowly migrated upward, until they emerged into the light, where they gradually began to propagate aboveground. “Microbe pioneers,” Gold wrote, “invaded the surface from below.”
― Will Hunt, Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet

“We’d emerged in one of the main cataphile haunts, a cavernous chamber with sand-packed floors and high ceilings supported by thick limestone columns. Every surface—every inch of the wall, of the pillars, and much of the rocky ceiling—was covered in paintings. In the darkness, the paintings were subdued and shadowy, but under the beam of a flashlight, they blazed. The centerpiece was a replica of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, with the curling wave of frothy blues and whites. Spread throughout the room were stone-cut tables, rough-hewn benches and chairs. At the center of the chamber was a giant sculpture of a man with arms raised to the ceiling, like a subterranean Atlas, holding up the city. “This is like—” Benoit paused, apparently searching for a recognizable analogy “—the Times Square of the catacombs.” On weekend nights, he explained, La Plage and certain other voluminous chambers in the catacombs filled with revelers.”
― Will Hunt, Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet