I was born 483 years after the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the hard wood door of a parish in Wittenberg, Germany. On my seventeenth birthday, that seed of the Protestant Reformation reached the relatively young age of half a millennium.
Ours are human stories written by the divine quill. But the temporal size of their relationship, those intervening years, feels abstracted. How could 483 years feel tangible, when we’ll only see about 100 years for ourselves?
But “abstracted” is an understatement for the first event Luther and I both acknowledge: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This first event moves first from beyond time into its birth, and also from nothingness into form. The objects of the verse—“heavens and the earth”—are so large as to be intangible and impersonal to us.
And yet we as Christians cleave to Genesis 1:1, because it is our beginning, the root of our place before God. Scripture is full of cosmic events that feel unrelatable to our constricted lifespans, and we hold them fast, even when they don’t feel as human as women drawing water from wells or as teachers growing patient with slow students.
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?
We seek our personal place within these larger, deeper events.
What, Then, of Abstracted Fiction?
One of my favorite notes to receive from anyone who reads my fiction is that it’s unrelatable. “This isn’t relatable,” they’ll say. “It doesn’t click for me, since it doesn’t align to what I know myself and other humans to do or be.”
“May I suggest the addition of your minimal imagination, my dearest reader?” I’ll respond (which is to say, I’ll never respond, because I have a short and fraught list of beloved people who read my work).
“Realist” fiction and nonfiction have consistently dominated our lists of leading books, and so it’s unremarkable to state that we like to see ourselves in what we read. Even the non-realist fictional worlds usually have a human-shaped keyhole for entry. This preference is understandable: Entering and living within a fictional world is more seamless when that world is replete with our recognizable human experiences, down to our daily concerns, concepts, predicaments, and fast food.
But “unrelatable” fiction exists has always existed, and its effect is intentionally not seamless. In The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis, for example, the human story of a fifth-grader who can raise the dead is interrupted frequently by chapters about the world’s genesis, eulogies for the souls of extinct animals, and the progress of glaciers over the face of Varennes, the novel’s Vermont setting.
This odd novel weaves disjointed human stories into an extended scope that began millions of years before the characters were born: the landscape of cosmic origin and extinction. This world of the Before is the novel’s the central plotline, one nearly indifferent to its human characters. It has no human-shaped keyhole for entry, though it does place human stories within the inaccessible realities of creation. And what is its effect?
But First, Deep Time in the Gospel of John
Davis, at least according to Anthony Domestico in Image Journal, actually writes realist fiction, in a sense—he calls her literary style “cosmic realism.” “Davis is one of the strongest writers of cosmic realism because few others so regularly, so relentlessly, place the human subject and the cosmos side by side,” Domestico writes, adding that “in every book, Davis finds the proper context for her characters’ lives not in social or political history but in deep time.”
“Deep time,” rather than “historical” or “ecological” or “environmental” time, concisely describes what The Thin Place creates. Davis doesn’t only invoke glaciers; she invokes lichens, the “Beautiful Nothing” that preexisted all else, the “strings” of space, and the beavers unwittingly approaching traps in the pond near Varennes. And she doesn’t merely name these features in passing, like they are high-minded ornamentation—she returns to them in every other chapter, while the human drama plays out as an obscure miniature.
A little flood — nor did it have its origins in God’s wish to wipe clean the slate but in an unstable pressure system and contending air masses.
If my description of the novel makes its human characters sound insignificant, it’s because they just might be. The grief of a strung-out journalist living lakeside feels diluted when you’re also contemplating all existence, “no bigger than a hazelnut and round as a ball,” with St. Julian of Norwich in her chapters. The human registers less, when viewed in relation to the cosmic.
But that’s not to say that the human is worthless in The Thin Place.
Davis glancingly mentions John 1 during one of the deep-time asides of the novel, writing, “the sun and the moon having always been with us, even before there was an us to be there with. Also, the Word. Let there be light, The greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night also.”
If we trail that “Word” allusion to its source in John 1: 1-5, we find the poem that conjures existence, the divine, and the human in one shared portrait:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Here, without a doubt, is deep time.
“In the beginning” names that depth before creation. “In the beginning was the Word” places Christ in that same depth. “[T]he Word was with God, and the Word was God” clarifies Christ beside (and within) God the Father, also present in the pre-Creation depth.
But John 1 narrates the acts, not merely the facts, of the cosmos. “Through him all things were made” centers Christ in the creation of every object, process, and being—including us. In three quick sentences, the passage moves from the nether-world of the Before into the teeming world of Creation, and it clarifies our place: connected intimately to God, as His own beings, from the very beginning of time.
Verse 4 then breathes sweeter life into this human-divine connection with “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” Here the metaphor of illumination appears for the first time in John, where it will glow continually. Christ, as “the light of all mankind,” keeps a singular place for us alone within all He has created. By design, we are not futile beings adrift in the impersonal processes of deep time, though alongside ecological and physical processes we can certainly feel that way. We are the people of light, the unworthy but chosen recipients of the eternal salvation which no darkness can swallow.
Our place as God’s people of light informs verse 14 also: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
He dwelled “among us,” and we perceived, and sometimes received, “his glory” as God’s son. This is no small relationship, y’all. This is our lot as the beloved of the Most High, He who moves cosmic processes infinitely beyond our perception. Every line that opens John invokes and describes these processes, and yet every line also adds to the portrait of our chosen place within them, recipients of the light that came Himself in the flesh. Human identity in John is blessed, the opposite of futile.
And Davis, by referencing John 1 in The Thin Place, nods to this Christian blessing. Given the disparate voices and modes of the novel, I doubt the divinely-blessed human identity is its bedrock foundation, but Davis does include it. I’d argue that it informs her understanding of deep time, at least slightly: “The hand of God, which has no shape, no up or down, no end of beginning, drew the world from itself like a rabbit from a hat,” Davis writes, imitating the sweeping, poetic-prose description that opens John.
The Cosmic Needs Not Discourage Us
I find Davis’s inclusion of the Christian and the blessed refreshing in The Thin Place, since our narratives about world-scale processes usually eliminate all but the measurable and tempt us with our own futility among them.
The creation of the world, the movement of its atmospheric gases, the kill-and-flee-and-rear cycles of animals great and small, the minute distribution of minerals through water and soil—these we can (and do) quantify as material processes. I’m not here to blather about the false dichotomy of science and Christianity. But I will point out that a scientific understanding of the world, like the Christian understanding, has its own processes far above humanity, initiated long before we knew them and certain to outlast us. They can seem fully independent of and impersonal to us.
What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
Oddly, this larger world feels the most impersonal when we discuss climate change—oddly because we’re personally responsible for the deterioration of those processes, so goes the argument. For all our culpability in their changes, we certainly feel powerless before the phenomena attributed to man-made climate change (that is, the measurable versions of cosmic processes): the annual ravaging hurricanes, the wildfires that clot the sky with apocalyptic smoke, and even the niggling fear that every new season is a few degrees less hospitable. They seem to roll over us and our little civilizations. Meanwhile, we wrestle over policies that any given partisan will condemn as societally crippling, not nearly helpful enough, or entirely too late.
Daegan Miller references a term in her essay “All Tomorrow’s Fables” that suits deep time: the “hyperobject,” defined as “a thing so massive, both spatially and temporally, that we cannot get outside of it for a clear, objective description.” She enlists the term to describe how climate change demands new storytelling modes, and I can’t fail to notice the phrase “we cannot.” In those two words, we find the spectre of human futility in the face of climate change, which is existential as well as environmental. Emphasizing the unapproachable size of climate change—implying our own relative insignificance—likely won’t spur human response nor resolve. When we treat the process only as a slow-motion apocalypse beyond our comprehension or reach, we invite the paralysis of doomed inevitability.
Miller, to her credit, understands our existential subtext of climate change, where our living is in crisis and we are infinitesimally small before it. It’s why she argues for new narrative modes to tell climate stories, in tandem with the anthology The World as We Knew It. Down to the level of syntax, Miller charts a different course for climate storytelling: re-configuring human narration of the environment so that humans are truer to their small size within those processes.
A city of caves spanning 4 million square feet sheltered thousands of persecuted Turkish Jews and Christians in the second century, its stalactites dripping gentle and endless droplets.
Her re-configuring mirrors The Thin Place, where the human is necessarily small when coexisting with the cosmic. But Davis doesn’t tempt futility in the way that climate stories can, with their bond to the hyperobject. She instead threads John 1 through her novel, adding to its larger mosaic the scene of man’s singular significance among the first cosmic events. It’s humbling, but it is not futile.
Attuned Through the Eye of Creation
To cycle finally to answering that first question: Davis’s cosmic fiction has the effect of attuning us as we read it.
As it refashions the human and the cosmic into joined complements, The Thin Place fine-tunes the reader’s attention to both worlds at once. The tremulous needles of the pine tree far above. Awkward but gentle social interactions with your neighbor at the door. The throbbing underwater volcanoes, mounting cooled lava. Fine, smooth skin on the inside of your wrist. Great celestial dust in swirling fleur-de-lis beyond the known reaches of space. Scraped-knee children in merry flight, spurring the wish for our very own. Even the least of these are created in beauty and pronounced good, and all are worth seeing keenly.
Observing them together illuminates them in contrast. Anything beyond the known reaches of space feels truly infinite when compared to the all-accessible skin of your wrist. And the wish for a child, for a son or daughter in kicking, heaving life, feels all the more personal when I consider those volcanoes I’ll only experience by imagination. I am better attuned to these features when I see them as sibling extensions of Creation.
But attuned is sensation, rather than knowledge.
Domestico, coming to a similar conclusion in his essay, writes, “The Thin Place implicitly makes a similar claim: know that there is a universe around you, a grand sweep of time and life, and you will come to know yourself more deeply.” His conclusion is similar to mine yet fine-grained in its difference: to “know that there is a universe around you” and thus to “know yourself” are not the same as being attuned to that cosmos and yourself.
Frankly, I will never understand sunspots. Nor glacial scarring across the face of northern valleys. Nor the open, impossible questions glittering among the galaxy of stars. Even if I were to drop everything for a new lifetime of ecology and astronomy, these would remain processes beyond my human mental capacity. But now—this exact moment, deskbound with a piano concerto playing into my ears—I sense those processes with awe, wonder, and great wistfulness, the feelings that my mundane living supplies in contrast.
In the Mare Tranquillitatis below the pocked lunar surface, the air hovers at 63 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is mostly emotional sensation, but that’s a substantial cosmic process unto itself. Sensation is the overpowering goosebumps along the arms and that unknowable warmth of the diaphragm—we feel its phenomena upon our bodies, as the world feels cosmic processes across its expanse.
That is the grandeur of The Thin Place: phenomena that trail both personal and gigantic sensations through you. It is deep and wide, it feels alien and all-explaining, it conflates the cosmos with the human heart. The Thin Place is a towering challenge to me, as Davis channels all the natural world alongside select features of the Christian and the ecological and somehow fashions them into harmonized notes of the same aria. Disparate but joined, they attune me to themselves on the page but also beyond it.
Then the sun came up; then it was another day. The created world can be both reliable and surprising.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on September 15 with an interview with the poet S.E. Reid.