Scrolling by means of Twitter sooner or later very early within the COVID-19 pandemic, I noticed a tweet that struck me as equal components mirthless and true. “Issues will probably be positive, finally, in 1000’s of years, for rocks,” quipped comic Donni Saphire. It jogged my memory of a saying my mom used to trot out once I was rising up, at any time when I received exercised by some trivial contretemps or different — unhealthy hair day, missed social gathering, hallway snub. “Within the grand scheme of issues,” she would drawl, “it simply doesn’t signify.”
This was patently unfaithful, after all, and worsening as well. For {the teenager}, as for the toddler, there isn’t any grand scheme of issues; there’s solely the now, and it signifies completely.
Nonetheless: All the pieces will probably be positive, within the grand scheme of issues, for rocks. On this period the place we discover ourselves locked in a perpetual calamitous stutter, teetering on the sting of disaster — why not attempt to think about issues from the unmoving, diamond-hard perspective of the mineral kingdom? It couldn’t harm.
I’m not the primary to counsel it. Poets have at all times used stones to convey the insensate, mute high quality of the deceased. However in talking of dying, Emily Dickinson resorts to stone imagery extra constantly, extra creepily and extra actually than maybe every other poet within the English language. “’Twas Heat — at first — like Us,” for instance, is a forensic description of a physique within the technique of rigor mortis, transmuting from particular person to factor: First the “Brow copie[s] stone,” then the eyes congeal like a “Skater’s Brook,” till the physique “drop[s] like Adamant” into the grave. The corpse’s “multiplied indifference” is given a extra cheerful spin in “Secure of their Alabaster Chambers,” the place Dickinson imagines the lifeless as so many “untouched” sleepers tucked safely of their stony beds.
Dickinson is fascinated by the imperviousness of stone, its uncomplaining persistence throughout the ages. “How completely satisfied is the little stone / That rambles within the highway alone,” she writes. Of what attainable significance is the span of a human life, she appears to ask, when measured towards the huge swaths of uncounted and uncountable time at granite scale?
Among the many uncomfortable side effects of the antidepressant medication often known as SSRIs — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — is what psychologists name “blunted” or “flattened have an effect on,” a diminished vary of emotive expression accessible to the affected person. I’ve been on and off — totally on — SSRI medicine since my grad school-induced nervous breakdown and first melancholy analysis on the age of 24. In different phrases, for upward of 30 years.
Once I first began taking the medicine, it didn’t suppress my emotivity altogether however merely overrode its paralyzing pressure. I used to be not so panicked that I couldn’t depart the sofa, nor so tearful that I couldn’t get off the bed. However because the years wore on, I observed that I used to be, in reality, much less apt to really feel. The place as soon as fear as to the destiny of my soul (as a baby) or my sanity (in my teenagers and 20s) had consumed me, with time I grew more and more unable to really feel any sort of approach concerning the future, at the least when it got here to my very own particular person particular person. Once I seemed forward, it was with none marked need or apprehension — not not like Dickinson’s stony sleepers, “Untouched by Morning / untouched by midday.”
To be truthful: Even earlier than the Prozac, I had not been given to passionate depth, which was not my household’s predilection. But past no matter genetic tendency towards affectlessness I might need come by naturally, I consider Prozac had a further numbing impact.
The air of impartial indifference with which I appeared to method my very own life turned a subject of medical curiosity once I was recognized with breast most cancers within the fall of 2019. Among the many many medical doctors I consulted was a psychiatrist appointed to verify on how I used to be coping mentally with the prospect of mastectomy and chemotherapy. I rattled off my psychiatric historical past highlights whereas she nodded and scribbled notes. “However how do you’re feeling?” she pressed. “I really feel positive, actually,” I saved repeating, smiling apologetically, conscious that one thing in my response to the falling-apart of my very own physique was falling in need of what she anticipated. Once I learn my medical report afterward, I discovered this: “Affected person appears to be talking with some isolation of have an effect on that’s noticeable (discussing her analysis and delicate matters with little to no emotional reactivity).”
A capability for sensation, or what my physician known as “reactivity,” is among the many oldest and most-trusted philosophical standards by which to guage a creature’s place within the hierarchy of residing issues. Aristotle famously created a taxonomy of “souls” to explain an ascending organic scale: Greens have been able to progress and replica, which Aristotle known as a “nutritive” soul. Animals, one notch up the ladder, exhibited the ensouled properties of vegetation and have been moreover able to feeling, movement and digestion. Lastly, people topped the chart as the one residing beings endowed with a “rational soul,” or the capability for thought. Minerals fell exterior the scope of life altogether.
Studying the psychiatrist’s report, I noticed myself slipping down the rungs of the Nice Chain of Being: previous the animal, previous the vegetable, touchdown with an adamantine thud among the many minerals.
But what if, like Dickinson, we may train ourselves to entertain the potential for a nonhuman scale — a geologic scale — as one other approach of wanting on the world?
Dickinson fixates on stony, unfeeling dying, sure. However she additionally employs the perspective of rocks to approximate sure inside psychological states she skilled whereas nonetheless residing, durations she felt to be a sort of death-in-life. In “After Nice Ache,” Dickinson’s narrator describes a suspended state of frozen torpor that seizes her within the aftermath of grief. The narrator strikes by means of life mechanically — “Regardless grown, / A Quartz contentment, like a stone.” In “It Was Not Demise,” narrated from the perspective of what she calls chaos itself, “stopless” and “cool,” Dickinson conjures an inert, watery “void” earlier than God created the shape by means of which we acknowledge our human-centered world. Such impersonal psychological states — quartz contentment, chaos cool — have been clearly terrifying for Dickinson. However they have been additionally instructive, apertures by means of which we would glimpse the world with out us.
Minerals and residing organisms are co-evolving, with nearly all of at present’s 5,000-plus documented mineral species a outcome, in a technique or one other, of the 3.8 billion years of organic exercise on the planet. A few of the most baroquely stunning crystals in existence, corresponding to malachite, type by means of the oxidation of copper sulfide minerals; these crystals turned a chemical risk as soon as the evolution of algal photosynthesis flooded the Earth’s ambiance with oxygen 2 billion years in the past. On the natural facet of the equation, early invertebrates folded aragonite and calcite crystals from the ocean into their very own metabolic cycles to construct enamel, bone and shell.
Once I informed a good friend about my incapacity for future-thinking or fear, he stated, “Isn’t that simply one other title for knowledge?” “Knowledge literature” is, certainly, typically touted as smart as a result of it urges readers to ponder questions of scale, the transitory nature of any single life within the grand scheme of issues.
Knowledge or chemical lobotomy, sagacity or mind deficit — who’s to say? Within the meantime, I’m enthusiastic about what I’d make of this peculiarly quartz-like lens.
To see like a stone, in Emily Dickinson’s sense, is to not flip a chilly shoulder to the struggling of a sentient Earth. Quite the opposite: It’s to sense these grand arcs that bind collectively the atoms of the cosmos, together with — however not lowered to — our personal species’ small, borrowed parcel of stardust.
Ellen Wayland-Smith is a professor in USC’s writing program and the creator of the forthcoming “The Science of Final Issues: Essays on Deep Occasions and the Boundaries of the Self,” from which that is tailored.
