All parties, cloaked by now in darkness and entering in and out of the conversation unseen like crickets, generally agreed that one would have to be very lucky indeed to ever find anything like a fossilized city, 100 million years from now. Human activity would more likely pop up in a strange layer of seafloor rock filled with isotopic oddities. After taking another swig of beer I then brazenly proposed that the Anthropocene—in comparison with the epic stacks of sediment that make up the other epochs—was therefore a ridiculous idea. It was subliminally fast in geological terms and, I argued, unless we figured out a way to persist for tens of millions of years, would not leave much in the way of a fossil record at all.

If there had been a record player to scratch, someone would have dutifully scratched it. It was as if I had insulted the very ancestral primates whose teeth we had spent all day plucking from the desert. The reaction to this provocation, especially from Wing, so surprised me that I began to rethink an essay I had just submitted to The Atlantic making similar claims. So, when I got home from Wyoming I sent the piece out to a bunch of geologists and paleontologists to make sure I had my head on straight. When the response came back enthusiastic, I swallowed hard and pressed send on the final draft.

The essay came out. Some geologists loved it. Some hated it. The Anthropocene is an oddball in Earth science. Unlike other settled issues, like climate change, there is no objective data set to point to and say, “Aha, there is an Anthropocene epoch.” It is a stratigraphic unit with minimal stratigraphy, first suggested by an atmospheric chemist, and disliked by many stratigraphers. The Anthropocene is something one can have opinions about—and people do (as I painfully learned on Twitter). Anyway, the article was meant to be provocative. I moved on.

Then the dreaded email from Scott Wing landed in my inbox. He was disappointed. And so I came to the National Museum of Natural History, as if being called into the principal’s office.

In the museum lobby I reunited with Wing, a man who positively exudes kindness and reflection, and nevertheless braced for a chronostratigraphic tongue-lashing. But Wing started on an unexpected note. He wanted to talk about southern Gothic literature.

“For me the essence of a lot of Faulkner is, before you can be something new and different, slavery is always there, the legacy of slavery is not erased, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’” he said. In Faulkner’s work, memories, the dead, and the inescapable circumstance of ancestry are all as present in the room as the characters who fail to overcome them. Geology similarly destroys this priority of the present moment, and as powerfully as any close reading of Absalom, Absalom! To touch an outcrop of limestone in a highway road cut is to touch a memory, the dead, one’s very heritage, frozen in rock hundreds of millions of years ago—yet still somehow here, present. And because it’s here, it couldn’t have been any other way. This is now our world, whether we like it or not.