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.

Before his discovery of either stones or elements, Sacks found stability in mathematics. Numbers seemed to him “solid, invariant … [and standing] unmoved in a chaotic world.” Mathematical purity, however, soon gave way to the murkier terrain of the physical sciences. Setting up a chemistry lab in his house when he was 10 years old, Sacks found that he preferred stable metals (like gold) over more reactive, unpredictable ones (like francium). He especially loved the weighty metals and smooth bars of tungsten his beloved uncle Dave would put in his hand, “something about [their] heaviness [and] density” giving him “a thrill.” He could barely believe it when his uncle smeared a piece of aluminum with mercury, and he watched in horror as the metal distorted and broke down as if ravaged by disease, leaving an ashy pile where something solid used to be. Was it an aberration? Or were elements not so reliable after all?

Sacks decided to find out. He conducted countless (reckless) experiments in his makeshift chemistry lab, more than once nearly setting himself or his parents’ house on fire. Over time, he came to understand subtle differences in reactivity, the ways that some substances succumb to acid or heat and others don’t. In the process, he learned that elements (unlike numbers) don’t all endure to the same degree. But he also learned, through careful experimentation, that elements—unlike human beings—could be sublimely predictable.

This seemed to be how Sacks negotiated the variability of the physical world. He tested it. He played with it. First in his childhood chemistry lab and later in a medical lab at Oxford, where he experimented on earthworms and chickens; in Venice Beach, where he tested his strength with bodybuilding; on his motorcycles, as he chased speed (both velocity and amphetamines); in any body of water where he could submerge himself to swim; and in psychiatric institutions, where he gravitated toward patients who had been neglected, forgotten, or deemed incapable of life or play. In each setting, he proceeded as he had as a child, experimenting with individual thresholds, finding distinctive characteristics and vulnerabilities, and writing about what makes something singular and worthy of attention. Throughout, he linked his early love of chemistry with his own boyhood experiences of boarding-school bullying and abuse, which inspired in him a lifelong quest for existential order, for a realm immune to cruelty. From the beginning to the end of his life, this remained the world of numbers, minerals, elements, and stones. “I needed to think of [them] as … able to stave off the losses and ravages of time,” he wrote.

In addition to stones and his cherished periodic table, in his last essays Sacks often returned to his London childhood. He wrote about memories of Shabbos with his family in the Orthodox Jewish community in Cricklewood, about his extended family and friends, about the 10-year-old boy who was enthralled with chemistry and who remained, to the end, enchanted by the possibilities of alchemy, about coming out to his father when he was 18 (and his mother’s fierce denunciation of him the next morning). He acknowledged that his fascination with rocks was rooted in a lifelong habit of negotiating loss by turning to the nonhuman world—a tendency that distanced him from other people and relegated him to loneliness for much of his life. And he admitted that he had a preference for the most neglected or misunderstood elements (like bismuth), just as he did for the most marginalized patients.

Before reading Sacks, I had never really thought about the relationship between humans and stones, minerals, and elements—this despite my having taken a yearlong weekend geology class when I was in the sixth grade. Each Saturday, I rode a school bus to the Talcott Mountain Science Center in Avon, Connecticut, where I would collect bits of stone from various rocky ledges, desperately looking for garnets, which were described to me as the “diamonds” of my landscape. (Almandine garnet is the state mineral of Connecticut.) This quest cemented in me an association between rocks and treasures. I prized the egg carton where I sorted the day’s bounty into numbered sections, painting dots on each rock to identify it. Sacks reminded me that rocks are where we find elements in tangible, stable forms. They are where the chemical world first took physical shape—the original alchemy being the production of stardust. We hold stones in our hands and put them in our pockets, never thinking about the deep ancestry that we share with them. In a geochemical sense, we are linked, made up of the same oxygen and sodium—the same basic building blocks of all life.

I can picture Sacks at his long table piled with books and manuscripts. He was known to be clumsy and a bit of a mess. Elements line up as miniature witnesses to the chaos of his work environment, impassive paperweights impervious to deadlines, unmoved by clutter or the scribbling of any pen. Perhaps while he wrote with impassioned urgency about his patients and his own life, he needed the company of still and quiet beings that could absorb his frenetic energy and remain the same year after year. An ordered universe of elements to counterbalance the relentless transience of everything else. Stones keeping watch in the night. Stones holding elements like jewels in a safe. Stones standing steady when everything else is falling apart.

Sacks wrote hundreds of intricate case histories in his lifetime, each one altering and expanding our knowledge of sickness and of health. His writings about elements, minerals, and stones are comparably brief. As crucial as elements were to him at the end of his life, Sacks’s attention was focused mainly on biology, not geology.

Luckily, we have Hugh Raffles’s 2020 text, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, which does for stones what so many of Sacks’s case histories did for his patients: render them in their full complexity, vivid and humane.

Raffles, an anthropologist who grew up in London and moved to New York, is now a professor at The New School. He started writing The Book of Unconformities after the deaths of two of his sisters (one in childbirth, one to suicide). Each chapter centers on a different kind of rock: marble in Manhattan, sandstone in the Outer Hebrides, gneiss in Edinburgh, magnetite in Iceland, blubberstone on the Norwegian island of Amsterdamøya, iron in Copenhagen, and thin sheets of muscovite in Theresienstadt, Germany. In his prologue, Raffles explains his infatuation in language that echoes Sacks: “I started reaching for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored.”

A world unmoored. It can happen to anyone at any time. Sometimes it is the sickness or death of a loved one. Sometimes it is one’s own illness. Sometimes it’s something else entirely: heartbreak, addiction, war, depression, loss of place. The world can come unhinged in moments when things that we took to be reliable or constant crumble or disappear. It may seem odd to reach for rocks when things already feel heavy. But Raffles was in need of a continuity beyond his own grief and the human frame through which he normally viewed the world. Twenty-five years after his sisters’ deaths, he returns to the Standing Stones at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides, where his sister Franki had lived. “Perhaps everything led here,” he writes, “yet another rocky cleft in yet another determinant world. … Standing on the edge of time, I feel [my sisters] washing through me. If only this cleft would open wide and swallow me too. If only I knew the rituals required.”

Unlike flowers, which bloom with the seasons only to wilt and fade, stones retain their shape and tone. They require no maintenance, weathering time in stoic resilience. A pile of wood asks for chopping and stacking; a pile of brush wants burning. Stones ask for nothing. Maybe you adjust a stone in a wall now and then or place another rock on a pile. Raffles lays a pebble atop a headstone in Berlin’s Weissensee Cemetery in a Jewish tradition of remembrance. Hikers stack stones in cairns along trails to mark a swerve in a route or the peak of a mountain. “I will build my church on this rock,” Jesus told Peter, and the name Peter—from the Greek petros, meaning “stone”—suggests a sense of foundation, the feeling that nothing will ever shift or sink. Bedrock.

Through his travels, Raffles comes to appreciate the complexity and elemental consistencies of stones as an indication of something beyond geologic stability, namely: “the stubborn vitality of even the most dead things.” The line, though Raffles’s, sounds uncannily like what Sacks discovered, not in chemistry, but in his work with patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica who were “awakened” in various degrees by doses of the experimental drug L-dopa. Sacks chronicled their stories in his 1973 book Awakenings, going on to dedicate his life to patients whose stubborn vitality others had failed to notice.

The liveliness of stones and their entanglement with human histories surprises Raffles, who writes in meticulous detail about each specimen he encounters. Rather than anchor him in an inhuman world impervious to loss, rocks end up teaching Raffles about the changing shape of grief and the persistence of life after death. Stones help him appreciate life’s vast unconformities, the holes and “fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding” that can never be filled. In Raffles’s global quest for “seemingly solid objects,” each new stone he finds seems weirder than the last, each place a mess of persistence and loss. In the opening chapter, Inwood marble, “a soft dolomite limestone, coarse, porous, and prone to fatal granulation called sugaring,” leads Raffles to Marble Hill in the Bronx, where the stone was first quarried in 1895. He catalogs the fraught history of this site, beginning with the mineral and crystal collectors who flocked there and working his way back to the Indigenous Lenape people, who knew that “all things have spirit, are innately alive and can exert influences on the things around them.” The more Raffles discovers about rocks, the less certain he becomes about the differentiation of mineral, vegetable, and animal—and the more animate, mysterious, and unpredictable life itself seems.

Near the end of his book, Raffles tries, for example, to take home a piece of obsidian volcanic stone called benmoreite from a beach in Iceland, putting it in the front seat of his car. As soon as he starts the engine, an alarm in the car goes off, a searing pitch that scares the birds and fills the desolate seascape. He tries to drive away anyhow, but the sound is too much, so he pulls the car over and leaves the rock on the side of the road, believing it to be responsible for the noise. Whereupon the alarm suddenly stops. When he later reports this episode to an Icelandic native, the man simply smiles and says, “That’s just normal; everything is alive. Well, everything except plastic.”

No sane person thinks that the stone actually set off an alarm or protested being carried off. Then again, in the glare of mourning, the world is awash in signs. A logical explanation might be that Raffles had placed this weighty stone in the front seat, triggering a seatbelt alarm when he started the engine. Or perhaps it had to do with magnetism and the rock’s interaction with some conductive part of the car. Magnetism was among the first mysteries associated with stones and one of the primary obsessions of ancient alchemists. Some stones attract or repel, making it seem as if they have agency or a will of some kind. Special powers. In addition to magnetism, Raffles documents other mysteries surrounding stones, unexplained phenomena dating back to antiquity, as well as rituals and practices linked with these phenomena, including strange burials of sandstone on the British Isles and the widespread belief that rocks were capable of growth, possessing “something akin to biological life.”

Some readers will stop there. They will argue that stones are paradigmatically motionless, dead, “mere things” and “lifeless beings of nature,” as Heidegger famously wrote. Raffles, intent on finding a reasonable explanation for the sounding of his car alarm, visits the Icelandic Volcano Museum and talks to its director. He is advised to return to the beach and repeat the experiment, because the idea that a rock set off an alarm is “nonsense of course” and there’s nothing “supernatural” about rocks. But Raffles is also a bit of a new materialist, the kind of person who is interested in the subtle insinuations of life across multiple forms and who views matter itself as relational, complex, plural, and open. While in Svalbard, Norway, visiting coal mines, Raffles realizes with jarring clarity that “coal was an animal here, just as whales and walruses were no more than matter.” Rocks give Raffles openings into histories and stories he could not have collected in any other way. They hold time, memory, minerals, fossils. They bear witness to atrocities. They aren’t dead matter but matter uniquely infused with the crosscurrents of life.

Unable to shake his confusion about the protesting piece of benmoreite, Raffles returns to the beach in the evening, first walking and then running as he starts to feel anxious about “the screeching birds, the towering lava pillars, the jagged, tumbling rocks, the sense of violence past and yet to come.” But something catches his eye. He ends the chapter just as he reaches toward another black stone—leaving the reader guessing whether or not he picked it up or tried to take it home.

Rocks aren’t alive in the way my daughters and our dog are alive—bursting with life. They don’t have nervous systems or even the simple nerve cells of sponges or the calcium ion channels of plants. By definition, a rock is made up of solid crystals of minerals that have fused together over time. They have no living cells. This all seems so clear and decisive, a reassuring bright line between the living and the nonliving. But Raffles, like Sacks, leaves the door ajar. The rocks he encounters are embedded in landscapes laden with histories. For those alert to their intricacies, they can trigger a flood of involuntary memory. In his clinical study of the painter Franco Magnani, Sacks describes the artist returning to his childhood village near Florence and “touching the stones, stroking them, caressing them [as he] grounded himself.” When Raffles arrives at Callanish and sees the stones he most associates with his sister Franki, he writes: “A curtain of chilled rain moves in, and not ready to leave, I settle on my haunches, pull up my hood, and shelter against a stone, alive to the deeply archaic currents moving through and around me.” The line between life and something else is not always clear. Raffles invites us to wonder about “spectral, uncanny, unpredictable life concealed in the landscape.”

Life can be spectral. Death is often haunting. Much remains unknown—about life and about death. Stones reassure us of the consistency of the nonliving world at the same time that they urge us to wonder about the status of   “life” beyond an anthropocentric frame. I can’t help thinking of Whitman’s lines: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” Neither alive nor dead, stones can help us exit a world of stark dichotomies and enter a more ambiguous place, a dim cavern where outlines are difficult to discern, a land where it’s suddenly hard to tell whether the mass at your feet is a rock or a baby.

Out the window, I see Violet in full stride on a stone wall. The rocks are tippy; she is running. A big stone gives way at the end of the wall, and she leaps to the ground as the last foot or so of wall clatters into a pile behind her. “No running on stone walls,” I tell her when she comes inside. She looks incredulous. “I’m serious,” I say. But it’s as useless to make rules about running and rocks as it is to hold onto a rock as if it could save you.

In a state geological survey titled The Surficial Geology of the Mount Carmel Quadrangle, I read about a glacial boulder near a pond by our house. Big, heavy, inert, it has strange ribboned marks on one side, as if eels or snakes had left their own imprints in chalk. Many such boulders exist in this part of Connecticut, evidence of deposits from ice moving north to south and a second sheet moving northeast to southwest. Most of the sediment and rocks in this area date to the late Triassic Period, roughly 230 million years ago. The number makes no sense to me, but the rock feels ancient and smells like time. Reading Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, I discover that boulders are called erratics if glacial action has carried them far from their origins. I wonder whether this one is an erratic, a word that perfectly fits the feel of our present time. I wonder how far it has traveled and what it has seen.

Geologists from ancient to modern times have known that rocks are not always as they seem. Stone-faced, stone-cold, stone-still. Erratic comes from the Latin root errare, to wander. Time is never what you think it is. Things falter and fall, and then they get up and get going again. Or they don’t, but something else does.

All this time I was looking for stones, for a wall, for more weight, for stability, for something to lean into. Instead I found life in other forms, as variable and mysterious as life must be: my girls barefoot in the stream, potatoes in the pantry going to seed, my brother’s voice on the phone, the dog nosing out chipmunks in the woodpile, a pitcher of water warbling on the table, apricot roses quivering in the sun, stale bread as hard as a rock, a hunk of white crystal dug up with bare hands.

It turns out I don’t even know what a stone is, let alone how to become one. And perhaps, without trying, I am more stone than I realized. Just as stones are less immutable than I originally believed. Just as everything under scrutiny begins to soften and vibrate, calling us to wonder whether it is what it is, or something else.

Whatever else they do, stones sit at the intersection of two worlds, the above and below. But just this high, barely above the ground. Just this low, their cool bottoms touching the earth. Some rocks you can climb; others you must crouch down to discover. Either way, they confound the distinction between the living and the dead, reminding us of other times, other places, of a silence that speaks and a speech that hums, of something beyond the frame of human consciousness and beyond the scope of sickness or health. Stones in the garden, stones by the sea. Stones on cliffs and stacked in lines crisscrossing emerald fields. Headstones and keystones and pebbles glistening in shallow waters, all of them testament to Earth’s rotation, her steady, indifferent pulse, her inhuman life.

Stacked or scattered, erratic or fixed, they invite us to pause and wonder at the weight of things. How heavy, how light, how much to lift or to push. How much to resist or to bend? It depends on the day and the size of the stone.