This sense of altered temporality is at its most profound in Austin’s account of reading a geology textbook, Old Red Sandstone (1841), introduced to her in the eighth grade through the auspices of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle:
the title had a calling sound; there was, for the child, a promise in it of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors, for lack of which she was for years, after her father’s death, a little sick at heart. I remember the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts, the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth—I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my favorite seat in the cherry tree which stood to the left of the door of the yellow house as you came out. I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape of Rinaker’s Hill, the Branch, the old rock quarry, unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map—the earth itself became transparent, molten, glowing. (104)
The intensity of the experience is signaled in part through Austin’s reversion to the first person voice, as if the memory is too powerful to accommodate the distanced objectivity of third person narration. What the “I” of her account remembers is a series of vivid details, both empirical–“the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts”—and numinous—“the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth.” This fusing of the actual and the mystical continues in the sentences that follow, where Austin locates the coordinates of her physical bearings (“I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my favorite seat in the cherry tree”) and undoes these through her descriptions of spatial transformation (“I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape … unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map”). Here, as in her descriptions of poetry above, reading is accompanied by a curious pairing of precise temporal-spatial measurement and the utter destruction of these, so that the reading subject feels herself both familiarly located and lost in space, uncannily situated between “Rinaker’s Hill” and a newly made earth, “transparent, molten, glowing.” This is a decisively more radical articulation of what Hamilton W. Mabie describes as “mental traveling.” His was a transport without disorientation, in which the reader remained in control of his new environs. Austin, by contrast, conjures up a world in which the book remakes the reader, thoroughly reconfiguring her sense of self and place.
Austin intensifies this feeling of dislocation by fusing the materiality of the geology textbook with that of her immediate vicinity, as if Old Red Sandstone and the “rock quarry” that surrounds her are somehow coextensive. The book, in other words, appears not just about the earth, but of it, deeply entwined with her physical environs. She describes the title as issuing “a calling sound,” thereby suggesting the book’s complicity with primordial nature. And she speaks of the book’s “promise … of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors,” a promise made good by the fact that Austin reads it in the open air. Most striking, however, is the way the text’s unfolding is metonymically linked to the transformations she experiences in physical space, in which her “familiar landscape” is “unfolded.” Austin’s reading, in other words, establishes a connection between narrative disclosure and spatial dis-closure, a theme reiterated in her final account of the book:
”Old Red Sandstone” disappeared from the family bookshelves about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school, but the sense of the unfolding earth never left her. There are moments still, when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico, when the first geological pages of the past begin to open and turn, when they are illuminated by such self-generated light as first shone from the chapters of “Old Red Sandstone.” (104–5)
Despite the fact that Old Red Sandstone is given away, Austin retains her memory of the book’s unfolding and, with it, “the sense of the unfolding earth.” Indeed, the connection between the open book and the open earth is so powerful, Austin confesses, that even now, “when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico,” the memory of reading transforms her surroundings, so that the “geological pages of the past begin to open and turn.” The ability of the earth to become book-like (the “geological pages of the past”) and the book to become earth-like (the “self-generated light” that “shone from the chapters”) attests to the deep imbrication of text and context, the capacity of reading to alter the grounds of understanding. Austin’s account, in other words, speaks to the transformative power of reading, not as a source of individual self-improvement, but rather as a catalyst for a regenerated relationship to one’s surroundings. Old Red Sandstone leaves the bookshelf in normative chronology—“about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school”—but the memory of its reading allows Austin to play with the coordinates of time and space, conjuring up and losing herself within the mountainous terrain the book describes.
By Austin’s account, this kind of imaginative activity was crucial in relieving her isolation, in creating a sense of connection to forces and people beyond herself. Reared by a remote, indifferent mother, largely unsympathetic to Austin’s intellectual ambitions, she saw books as the only evidence that she was not alone in her curiosity and aesthetic appreciations, “that there were people in the world to whom these things were not strange, but exciting and natural” (132). More particularly, Austin praises books for providing her a sense of correspondence and intimacy with other objects. After reading Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book “associated in her mind with her father’s reading,” Austin describes how
Mary had wanted just to turn and savor the work in her mind, make it real for herself that there were buildings in the world like that, strange and lovely whorls and intricate lacings and vinelike twistings of forms in stone; that you could go to them; that she herself might go there sometime. (132)
Austin’s dual desire for authenticity and for connection creates the effect of a reader imbricated in the structures she reads about—her descriptions of wanting to “turn … the work in her mind” read as an analogue to the “vinelike twistings of forms in stone.” Her reading not only assuages her loneliness, it also provides her with what Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit call “inaccurate selfreplications,” forms that correspond to the self without being absolutely reducible to it.99 It thereby allows her to achieve a profound connection with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world, what Austin elsewhere describes as “a continuing experience of wholeness” (283). In the introduction to Earth Horizon, she writes, “It has always been a profound realization of my life that there was a pattern under it.… It was to appreciation of this inherency of design that I came as a child, reassured of its authenticity; felt it hovering in advance of moving to envelop me in its activities, advising and illuminating” (vii). To be “envelop[ed]” by a pattern or design is, for Austin, to be cloaked, willingly, by sentient forces greater than the self, to experience “the totality which is called Nature” (vii). It is this sense of nonsubjugating fusion that reading books like Old Red Sandstone and The Seven Lamps of Architecture seems to generate. The unfolding of the narrative creates an unfurling of environs, so that the self is set adrift among the elements. In the process, unitary identity gives way to a sense of collaborative merging with author, text, ancestral forces, and material earth.100
Austin’s vision of communion