…imagine that the earth — four thousand six hundred million years old — [were] a forty-six-year-old woman…. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman… - Arundhati Roy

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…imagine that the earth — four thousand six hundred million years old — [were] a forty-six-year-old woman…. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old…when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five — just eight months ago — when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life…. It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought…that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge — was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.