Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now by Vincent Ialenti (review)

(p. 193). Such an ethics remains rooted in a respect for the “unbridgeable distance between living beings” (p. 195), one that we can see, Traisnel insightfully notes, in the ethology of Uexküll. Traisnel’s theory of capture and his interest in genre provoke two important questions that future work must consider. While Traisnel tracks the afterlives of capture in the present-day factory farming industry, one wonders about how this theory of capture might apply to the proliferation of pets at the turn of the century (many of whom were and are literally “captive,” as it were, in houses); at the end of the nineteenth century, the pet industry began to burgeon into existence and thereby dramatically reconfigured human relationships with animals. How, then, does capture—“from capere, meaning to seize with one’s hands,” as Traisnel reminds us (p. 18)—apply to these domesticated creatures raised by hand, as it were? Traisnel’s book also provokes questions about the genre of poetry, most especially when one arrives at the conclusion and reads the haunting epigraph from Dickinson: “I held it so tight that I lost it / Said the Child of the Butterfly / Of Many a vaster Capture / That is the Elegy —.” If Hawthorne’s “poetic” speculations resist a paradigm of capture, then how did poems in the nineteenth century resist and perhaps participate in this same paradigm? Future answers to these questions must rely on the help of Traisnel’s remarkable new book.