A Short Review of Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet

       
          I've been reading during this state-imposed isolation about isolated places in the world, lonely, dark places that make us question our very existence.  When we go down into the dark, I've been reading, sometimes we come out changed.  I think we will be changed after all of this, but perhaps we will have a better grasp on the importance of preparedness and the importance that each person holds in this world.

In this blog I will write about the book Underground by Will Hunt, an exploration of the worlds beneath our feet.

          Since we are all feeling a bit like moles during the Covid-19 pandemic, burrowing into our homes to avoid contracting the virus, what better book to read at the present moment than Will Hunt's Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet. It might even make you feel better about your current self- and community-imposed retreat from the public world.
          What is Underground about, you might ask? Think of all the underground spaces in the world.  Will Hunt doesn’t categorize or organize underground spaces in any way in his book.  Instead, he reverently explores different subterranean spaces, be they human made, natural, mythological, or a blending of all three.
          He begins his book  in New York City, exploring the subways.  He heads into the tunnels when the platform is empty, avoiding trains by ducking into nooks.  He shines light into crannies to document graffiti and makes all manners of discoveries within this space, including the people he meets who live in the subway, who he calls the mole people.  Moving from the urban to the natural world, he delves into forgotten chambers, crawls through claustrophobia-inducing tunnels, spelunks into caves oppressive in the depth of their darkness. Most importantly, he explores the implications that these spaces have for our psyches, the way we approach the world and the manner in which we regard the afterlife.
          In one chapter, he writes about John Cleves Symmes, a man who, in the early 19th century, announced that he would lead a journey to the center of the earth.  He based his exploration on  pseudoscience and speculation about the manner in which the earth was created, and as a result he became an international laughing stock. Yet he sparked the imagination of the world.  Eventually, Jules Verne would write the wildly popular Journey to the Center of the Earth based on Symmes’ scheme, a science fiction novel about an expedition through the earth’s crust down into the center of the earth where a Saurian race had dominion.  This is an example of how Hunt shows the fascination  the underground holds for us, how it captures our interest and refuses to let go. As Hunt writes, “I loved that even the briefest trip into a tunnel or a cave felt like an escape into a parallel reality . . . . Down in the dark, I thought I might find a perverse kind of enlightenment.”
          In another chapter, Hunt describes being lost underground during his ill-advised excursion into the catacombs beneath France.  He didn’t plan well, hadn’t been underground in this location before and was also leading others down with him.  But in getting lost,  he had an experience of divine disorientation, that is to say, he lost himself and found himself anew, all while underground.  He says that the underground offers a unique frontier for us, one that is dark and often unexplored but  capable of offering transcendent experiences.  He elaborates by referring to Dante’s journey into the Inferno. Dante was a lost, wandering soul before he found the entrance to the realm of Hell, but being lost  became  a catalyst for holy experiences.  The underground, according to Hunt, can be this kind of catalyst for all of us.  “Our connection to caves may well be our most universal, most deeply inscribed, perhaps our original religious tradition.”
          One of my favorite chapters in Hunt’s book is called “The Burrowers.” It is about people who dig for the sake of digging, who have no reason to dig but have desire to do little else.  One man, WIlliam Lyttle, a Londoner from the mid 20th century, dug himself a wine cellar.  However, he did not stop there.  He dug and dug, eventually digging a network of tunnels underneath his house.  After this network  was discovered by officials, he was told the house was structurally unsound and that he would have to relocate.  In his old age, he moved to an apartment, and  after he died, others discovered that he had been digging tunnels through the walls.  Hunt compares Lyttle’s impulse to  a civilization, the ancient Cappadocians, who dug whole cities out of the porous rock that their dwellings aboveground were situated upon.  They hid there when invaders came, which  preserved their civilization.  “Evolutionary psychologists,” he writes, “have suggested that even our most archaic ancestral relationships to landscapes never quite fade, that they become wired in our nervous system, manifest in unconscious instincts that continue to govern our behaviour.”
          Man’s simultaneous fear of and reverence for the underground spaces in the world fascinates me.  Many of our most powerful myths derive from them (Orpheus attempting to rescue his wife Eurydice from the depths of Hell, of Odysseus, Theseus and Aeneas venturing to the underworld seeking answers to profound questions). And, partly because of Dante, we think of the Christian Hell as an entire multi-layered, rich and strange world beneath our feet. In descending underground, we descend into ourselves.