The Unequal Hours: Moments of Being in the Natural World

By Linda Underhill

After spending most of her life in the city, Linda Underhill moved to rural Allegany County, New York, in 1989 and observed a successful citizens' protest against a low-level nuclear waste dump near her home. Having always thought the environmental movement applied mainly to the wilderness, Underhill began writing to voice the essence of what her neighbors were trying to preserve in their own backyards.

Her essays describe elements of the natural world: wind, water, ice, fire, trees. The title essay concerns the "unequal hours" of the changing seasons, while other essays explore a nature preserve, a garden, backyard wildlife, and a hot air balloon ride. Deliberately choosing settings close to home, she shows that one does not have to go on a wilderness voyage to appreciate the natural world.

The Unequal Hours brings to our attention the sudden, intense experiences of reality that Virginia Woolf called "moments of being" by using the events of everyday life as a way to explore what the natural world means to ordinary people. Like the sudden moments of illumination in haiku, the "moments of being" Underhill describes are rooted in the ordinary, but they reveal the extraordinary.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820320404
• ISBN13: 9780820320403
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Variablity of Time

Everyone knows how time seems to fly when you are having fun or drags when you are bored or in an unpleasant place. Clearly, our experience of time is a relative thing. Linda Underhill captures this sense of varable time in her lovely essays set in the quiet hours of the natural world. All of the essays are skillfully written but one of the most beautiful describes Moss Lake, a kettle lake in Allegany County in western New York. Among the sundews and pitcher plants, she carries us into the watery web of ancient glacial-formed lakes and helps us understand how the icy past is the groundwork on which the present biophilia stands. There are moments of such breathtaking grace in the essays that they act as stillpoints. Yet we are always aware of the dynamic nature of the natural world.