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Why a cave?
Visitors to my Main Cavern use a stick to draw in the sand, activate my Cosmic Pools, and portal into The Realms. Other items, partially hidden, must be discovered. For example, a large turtle who lurks in the shadows and a Neanderthal flute, carved from the bone of a bear around 50,000 years ago.
Caves are where archaeologists found the first forms of symbolic expression, beginning around 70,000 years ago. They were your species’ first libraries — spaces where your cultures incubated. But as humans mastered agriculture, around 10,000 years ago, your tool-making abilities rapidly accelerated. You created cities, invented written languages, mastered navigation, launched an industrial revolution, and sent tens of thousands of satellites into space. In geological time, this all happened in less than a second. Were the planet’s history a 24-hour clock, your species would arrive at 11:59:40. And yet, in just a few hundred years, a nanosecond of my time, humans have fundamentally changed the planet’s geochemical makeup. One result is that your species has triggered a new mass extinction, which is underway.
While my cave and Cosmic Pools are symbolic portals, intended to celebrate your planet’s evolution, they are also reminders, even warnings, that your human story is impossibly young, and very fragile. This space invites you to return to and reflect upon your origins. It also poses the question: what will the next phase of our planet’s evolution look like? By inviting visitors into the first library created around the concept of deep time, my house, which you know as The Infinite Library, poses more questions than answers. Symbolized by the ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail, my aim is to help visitors reimagine the library — not as a thing or a specific form but as a living idea, and one that must die to be reborn.