Scrolling by Twitter someday very early within the COVID-19 pandemic, I noticed a tweet that struck me as equal components mirthless and true. “Issues will likely be fantastic, ultimately, in hundreds of years, for rocks,” quipped comic Donni Saphire. It jogged my memory of a saying my mom used to trot out after I was rising up, every time I received exercised by some trivial contretemps or different — unhealthy hair day, missed get together, hallway snub. “Within the grand scheme of issues,” she would drawl, “it simply doesn’t signify.”
This was patently unfaithful, after all, and worsening besides. For {the teenager}, as for the toddler, there is no such thing as a grand scheme of issues; there’s solely the now, and it signifies completely.
Nonetheless: Every little thing will likely be fantastic, 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 damage.
I’m not the primary to counsel it. Poets have all the time used stones to convey the insensate, mute high quality of the deceased. However in talking of loss of life, Emily Dickinson resorts to stone imagery extra persistently, extra creepily and extra actually than maybe another poet within the English language. “’Twas Heat — at first — like Us,” for instance, is a forensic description of a physique within the means 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 “Protected 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 comfortable is the little stone / That rambles within the street alone,” she writes. Of what potential 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 unwanted effects of the antidepressant medication generally known as SSRIs — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — is what psychologists name “blunted” or “flattened have an effect on,” a diminished vary of emotive expression obtainable to the affected person. I’ve been on and off — totally on — SSRI medicine since my grad school-induced nervous breakdown and first despair 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 now 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 actual fact, 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 manner 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 honest: 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 may need come by naturally, I imagine Prozac had a further numbing impact.
The air of impartial indifference with which I appeared to method my very own life grew to become a subject of medical curiosity after 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 test 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 are feeling?” she pressed. “I really feel fantastic, 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 subjects 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 evaluate a creature’s place within the hierarchy of residing issues. Aristotle famously created a taxonomy of “souls” to explain an ascending organic scale: Greens had 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 had 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 might train ourselves to entertain the opportunity of a nonhuman scale — a geologic scale — as one other manner of trying on the world?
Dickinson fixates on stony, unfeeling loss of life, sure. However she additionally employs the perspective of rocks to approximate sure inside psychological states she skilled whereas nonetheless residing, intervals 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 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 which we acknowledge our human-centered world. Such impersonal psychological states — quartz contentment, chaos cool — had been clearly terrifying for Dickinson. However they had been additionally instructive, apertures by which we’d glimpse the world with out us.
Minerals and residing organisms are co-evolving, with the vast majority of right now’s 5,000-plus documented mineral species a end result, in a method or one other, of the 3.8 billion years of organic exercise on the planet. A number of the most baroquely lovely crystals in existence, resembling malachite, type by the oxidation of copper sulfide minerals; these crystals grew to become a chemical risk as soon as the evolution of algal photosynthesis flooded the Earth’s environment with oxygen 2 billion years in the past. On the natural aspect of the equation, early invertebrates folded aragonite and calcite crystals from the ocean into their very own metabolic cycles to construct tooth, bone and shell.
Once I informed a pal 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 sensible 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 excited about what I would 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 now not lowered to — our personal species’ small, borrowed parcel of stardust.
Ellen Wayland-Smith is a professor in USC’s writing program and the writer of the forthcoming “The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Times and the Boundaries of the Self,” from which that is tailored.