Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

by Annie Dillard

The rubric for passing the peace requires that one shake hands with whoever is handy and say, “Peace be with you.” The other responds, “Peace be with you.” Every rare once in a while, someone responds simply “Peace.” Today I was sitting beside two teen-aged lugs with small mustaches. When it came time to pass the peace I shook hands with one of the lugs and said, “Peace be with you,” and he said, “Yeah.”

Charles Darwin came to the Galápagos in 1835, on the Beagle; he was twenty-six.

Fundamentalist Christians, of course, still reject Darwinism because it conflicts with the creation account in Genesis. Fundamentalist Christians have a very bad press. Ill feeling surfaces when, from time to time in small towns, they object again to the public schools’ teaching evolutionary theory. Tragically, these people feel they have to make a choice between the Bible and modern science. They live and work in the same world as we, and know the derision they face from people whose areas of ignorance are perhaps different, who dismantled their mangers when they moved to town and threw out the baby with the straw.

And so forth. Like flatworms, like languages, ideas evolve. And they evolve, as Arthur Koestler suggests, not from hardened final forms, but from the softest plasmic germs in a cell’s heart, in the nub of a word’s root, in the supple flux of an open mind.

I watched the red rooster, and the rooster, reptilian, kept one alert and alien eye on me. He pulled his extravagant neck to its maximum length, hauled himself high on his legs, stretched his beak as if he were gagging, screamed, and blinked. It was a ruckus. The din came from everywhere, and only the most rigorous application of reason could persuade me that it proceeded in its entirety from this lone and maniac bird.

I am sitting under the sycamore on the riverbank below the cottage, just below the driveway. The dog and I have returned from a walk through the woods by the river upstream. Now I sit and look around and try to comfort the dog, who, on his part, is trying to persuade me to continue our walk downstream to New Orleans.

There is an old Pawnee notion that when you are in your thirties and forties you are “on top.” The idea is that at this age you can view grandly, in the fullness of your strength, both the uphill struggle of youth and the downhill slide of age. I suggest that this metaphor is inaccurate. If there is such a place as “on top”—if there is a sensation of riding a life span’s crest—it does not last ten or twenty years. On the contrary, the crest is so small that I, for one, missed it altogether.