Deflection

My father and I were joking about the smoothness with which some people deflect questions. He'd been telling me about a webinar he'd heard where a diplomat seamlessly bypassed someone's question. Of course I do the same, he quipped, which is perhaps true - though it's sometimes in service of providing an answer fuller than the questioner anticipated. So I pointed out the best deflection I'd recently encountered, in a book we're both reading, Robert Macfarlane's Underland: A Deep Time Journey. 

Intrepid explorer and poet Macfarlane is talking with an ice-core scientist at the British Antarctic Survey named Robert Mulvaney, who helped produce ice cores gong back 120,000 years and is hoping to find ice a million or more years old (both in Antarctica). 'There's a climate puzzle that on one has been able to solve," Mulvaney tells Macfarlane. "Around one million years ago, the climate flips its periodicity from a 40,000-year frequency to a 100,000-year frequency. Why? No one knows. And if we can't explain that about the climate, how can we claim to know anything?" Macfarlane's report of the conversation concludes:

   Before I leave I ask Mulvaney a last question ... 

   'Does working in spans of time as great as those you inhabit - 100,000 years, a million years - make the human present, our hours, our minutes, seem somehow brighter and more true, or does it crush them to irrelevance?'

   He thinks for a few minutes.

   'Sometimes I hold a piece of rock and a piece of ice in my hand,' he says. 'Both have come from far under the surface, both carry messages from pre-human history. But in ten minutes' time the ice will have vanished, while the rock will still be here.'

   Pause.

   'This is why ice is exciting to me and rock is not. This is why I'm a glaciologist and not a geologist. Ice still thrills me with its durability and its perishability, even after all these years and all this core.'

(W. W. Norton, 2019), 352-3