The Weight of a Stone

How does one become a stone? Begin by sitting still. Let the world go on around you. Don’t move. Don’t cry. Write a bit, but do not speak. Sit out in the rain. Get cold. Warm up in the sun. Hum, but don’t sing. Let someone lean against you or sit on top of you. Bask. Don’t move.

When she was a toddler, my younger daughter, Violet, liked to play a game. She would make herself into a small ball on my bed and try to be perfectly still. “Pretend I’m a rock!” she’d command. I would do as told and pretend not to notice her. Eventually I would lay my head on her back and say something about the nice resting place I’d discovered and what a surprise it was to find this rock in the middle of nowhere. She would giggle and start to wiggle. Then she would softly start to cry. At this moment, I was supposed to act surprised and exclaim, “Wait a minute! That’s not a rock! It’s a baby!” Then I’d scoop her into my arms and offer to adopt her.

Over the years, the game became more elaborate. Sometimes, Violet was a baby who had been cursed by a witch. Other times, she had been abandoned in the woods or had a sister who was also a rock that needed adopting. Over and over, I’d find a “rock” on my bed and faithfully follow the script, always ending with feigned surprise. Wait a minute! That’s not a rock! It’s a baby! We played this game for years, until I could no longer remember how the game began. Who would think of such a thing, of a rock that turns into a baby?

Violet is nine now and rarely pretends to be a rock anymore. The last time she did was a bit awkward and halfhearted, though she still laughed at the end. As the game recedes further into the past, I find myself thinking more about rocks. Specifically, I’ve started to wonder whether they are really as lifeless and inert as they seem. What led to these thoughts? I’m not sure. Perhaps it was the move from city to country that we undertook in the midst of the pandemic, a move to a Connecticut landscape littered with stones.

Through my window, I can see a meandering stone wall falling apart in places. When I walk the dog, I pass mounds of stone in the woods. I stroll dirt roads pocked with mica and quartz. Violet began digging for “crystals” in the back yard and left piles of rocks on the blacktop. She hauled a big rock home from the beach and left it on the counter.

In all this time, I’ve appreciated the thereness of stones juxtaposed against the fleeting sense of time, seasons, youth, health, justice, and democracy. Rounds of illness come and go, elections are held and insurrections launched, rabbits eat the beans, children have birthdays and lose their teeth, the dog unearths half a deer skeleton, there’s another mass shooting, a war breaks out across the world, we witness hurricanes, heat waves, snowstorms, death. The hollyhocks get accidentally mowed just as they were starting to sprout. We wait for rain. Through everything, the stones stay the same day after day, each one an emblem of calm indifference.

Philosophers have not been particularly attentive to stones. This might be surprising given the myth of the philosopher’s stone—a magical rock that, when ground into a powder or made into an elixir, was said to grant immortality or turn things to gold. Alchemy was at the heart of the ancients’ infatuation with stones. In our modern era of chemistry, physics, and the scientific method, such ideas are considered outlandish. We’ve grown too rational for alchemy. Stones are simply stones. Stony. Not magic. Not babies.

I agree, and yet there is something about the idea of transmutation that I can’t quite give up. It’s not that I think a stone will actually come to life. It’s not even that I believe in the legend of wishing stones, the smooth gray rocks ringed with wavering white lines that I collected as a child. I certainly don’t expect to find a lifesaving ruby that grants immortality or turns things to gold, neither of which I would even want. What interests me are the feelings of hesitation and unknowing that I sense when I examine a stone. I have one on the windowsill, a rough piece of pink granite tied with a green satin bow. It is the most basic, blunt thing in the world, but when I hold it, I can almost feel the quarry and the sea, seasons, stars, time. It has collected heat from the sun that radiates into my palm. For a moment, I could confuse it for a small gray creature, a mouse or a vole. As soon as I put it back in its place, it reverts and almost disappears into its stoniness.

Scouring my bookshelves, I find a few references to stones in Aristotle, more in Theophrastus (Aristotle’s student and the author of On Stones, a proto-phenomenology of crystals and gems), and various mentions in Heidegger, Simone Weil, Wittgenstein, Annie Dillard, and John Berger. Oddly, perhaps, it is the late physician, neurologist, and author Oliver Sacks who offers the most poetic assessment of rocks. Near the end of his life, Sacks wrote a series of beautiful short essays for The New York Times. One of them, titled “My Periodic Table,” explains his love of rocks and minerals and his ritual of collecting an element from the periodic table for each of his years on Earth. At one end of his desk, he had element 4, “a beautifully machined piece of beryllium.” At the other end, he had element 82, lead.

Elements aren’t stones, but they are the chemical ingredients of minerals, which in turn can combine and crystallize into physical rocks. Some stones consist of one mineral (like marble and sometimes limestone and sandstone), others of many (like granite, which might include feldspar, quartz, and mica). In any case, one goes to stones to find both minerals and elements, a layer of atomic identity and stability at the foundation of the world. For Sacks, the elements were little symbols of eternity, and in the waning months of his life, as he faced an aggressive cancer of the liver, they took on increasing urgency as avatars of solidity. He explained, “Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.” As Sacks wrote, rocks and stones are reminders of deep time—the time beyond clocks and calendars or human minds. In moments of transition, loss, or uncertainty, stones provide the sense that some things last, if not forever, then at least for a very long time.