Why rocks? What’s
the attraction? They’re common. You find them everywhere. At first, it’s a lazy
hobby for the unambitious. There is the aesthetic angle – quartz and other
crystals. I took my oldest son to gem and mineral shows and shops, and he fell
for bismuth, a crystalline metal. Mica has its adherents, as do slate, pyrite
and chalcedony. But something more essential is involved. Rocks feel permanent.
They’re older than us, tougher and more enduring, evidence of an earlier,
pre-human Earth. Rocks are indifferent. Deborah Warren suggests some of this in
her poem “Pressure”:
“Put a
little pressure and heat on rock,
give it
time, and shale turns into slate.
It’s the
same with calcium carbonate
slowly
reinventing itself as chalk.
“Limestone’s
in no hurry; it started to harden
during the
Lower Jurassic into marble.
Graphite
spends millennia on diamond:
“The luxury
of eons.
At any rate,
slow or
slower, they move in mineral time
with plenty
of leisure for maturing late.
Nice for
them. I have a different clock,
skin-shallow.
Animals can’t afford to wait.”
Our timeline
is brief and accelerated. In his poem “In Praise of Limestone,” Auden calls us “the
inconstant ones.” We can’t compete with rocks, though even they are impermanent,
if you think geologically.
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