TEACHING

A STONE TO TALK
by Annie Dillard

Wherever there is stillness there is the still stone’s lessons, or, more accurately, I should say for
small voice, nature’s old song and dance . . . the ritual or rituals they perform together several times
a day.
A meditation on silence and other matters.
No one knows what goes on at these sessions, least of
all myself, for I know Larry but slightly, and that
owing only to a mix-up in our mail. I assume that, like
any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacri­
he island where I live is peopled with cranks fice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a cer­

T like myself. In a cedar-shake shack on a cliff is

a man in his thirties who lives alone with a
stone he is trying to teach to talk.
Wisecracks on this topic abound, as you might
tain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes
transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. I wish
him well. It is a noble work, and beats, from any angle,
selling shoes.
expect, but they are made, as it were, perfunctorily, Reports differ on precisely what he expects or wants
and mostly by the young. For in fact, almost everyone the stone to say. I do not think he expects the stone to
here respects what Larry is doing, as do I, which is why speak as we do, and describe for us its long life and
I am protecting his (or her) privacy, and confusing for many, or few, sensations. I think instead that he is
you the details. It could be, for instance, a pinch of trying to teach it to say a single word, such as “cup,” or
sand he is teaching to talk, or a prolonged northerly, or “uncle.” For this purpose he has not, as some have
any one of a number of waves. But it is, I assure you, a seriously suggested, carved the stone a little mouth, or
stone. It is—for I have seen it—a palm-sized, oval furnished it in any way with a pocket of air which it
beach cobble whose dark gray is cut by a band of white might then expel. Rather—and I think he is wise in
which runs around and, presumably, through it; such this—he plans to initiate his son, who is now an infant
stones we call “wishing stones,” for reasons obscure living with Larry’s estranged wife, into the work, so
but not, I think, unimaginable. that it may continue and bear fruit after his death.
He keeps it on a shelf. Usually the stone lies pro­
tected by a square of untanned leather, like a canary Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of
asleep under its cloth. Larry removes the cover for the world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

36
The Chinese say that we live in the world of the ten Then they asked Moses to beg God, please, never to
thousand things. Each of the ten thousand cries out to speak to them directly again. “ Let not God speak with
us precisely nothing. us, lest we die.” Moses took the message. And God,
God used to rage at the Israelites for frequenting pitying their fear, agreed. And he added to Moses, “Go
sacred groves. I wish I could find one. Martin Buber say to them, Get into your tents again."
says, “The crisis of all primitive mankind comes with
the discovery of that which is fundamentally not-holy, It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall
the a-sacramental, which withstands the methods, and to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is
which has no ‘hour,’ a province which steadily enlarges hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The
itself.” Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the
world seems not-holy. We have drained the light from burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting
the boughs in the sacred grove and snuffed it in the matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind
high places and along the banks of sacred streams. We once cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech
as a people have moved from pantheism to panatheism. has perished from among the lifeless things of earth,
Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live and living things say very little to very few. Birds may
where we want to live. crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink oink. But so do
You may ask God for his presence, or for wisdom, and cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders
receive each at his hands. Or you may ask God, in the break the air in lightning storms. 1 call these noises
words of the shopkeeper’s little gag sign, that he not go silence. It could be that wherever there is motion there
away mad, but just go away. Once, in Israel, an is noise, as when a whale breeches and smacks the
extended family of nomads did that. They heard God’s water—and wherever there is stillness there is the still
speech and found it too loud. The wilderness genera­ small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind,
tion was at Sinai; it witnessed there the thick darkness nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from
where God was: “And all the people saw the thunder- town. At any rate, now it is all we can do, and among
ings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, our best efforts, to try to teach a given human lan­
and the mountain smoking.” It scared them witless. guage, English, to chimpanzees.

37
 In the forties an American psychologist and his wife give your life’s length to listening, and nothing hap­
tried to teach a chimp actually to speak. At the end of pens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that
three years the creature could pronounce, in a hoarse single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intoler­
whisper, the words “ mama,” “papa,” and “cup." After able. The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it
another three years of training she could whisper, with is all there is.
difficulty, still only “mama,” “papa,” and “cup.” The
more recent successes at teaching chimpanzees Ameri­ We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do
can Sign Language are well known. Just the other day with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry
a chimp told us, if we can believe that we truly share a teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind,
vocabulary, that she had been sad in the morning. I’m or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves,
sorry we asked. all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
What have we been doing all these centuries but We can stage our own act on the planet— build our
trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils—
that, raise a peep out.of anything that isn’t us? What is but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain.
the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? We don’t use the songbirds, for instance. We don’t eat
Are they not both saying Hello? We spy on whales and many of them; we can’t befriend them; we can’t per­
on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and suade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer
pray till we’re blue. weed seeds. We can only witness them—whoever they
are. If we weren’t here, they would be songbirds falling
I have been reading comparative cosmology. At this in the forest. If we weren’t here, material events such
time most cosmologists favor the picture of the evolv­ as the passage of seasons would lack even the meager
ing universe described by Lemaitre and Gamow. But I meanings we are able to muster for them. The show
prefer a suggestion made years ago by Paul Valery. He would play to an empty house, as do all those stars that
set forth the notion that the universe might be “head­ fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an
shaped.” To what is the head listening, what does it eye on things. And that is why I went to the Galapagos
see, of what does it think? Or is the universe and all it Islands.
contains a snippet of mind?
The mountains are great stone bells; they clang All of this becomes especially clear on the Galapagos
together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? A thou­ Islands. The Galapagos Islands blew up out of the
sand million galaxies are easily seen in the Palomar ocean, some plants blew in on them, some animals
reflector; collisions between and among them do, of drifted aboard and evolved weird forms—and there
course, occur. But these collisions are very long and they all are. The Galapagos are a kind of metaphysics
silent slides. Billions of stars sift among each other laboratory, almost wholly uncluttered by human cul­
untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as ture or history. Whatever happens on those bare vol­
always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over canic rocks happens in full view, whether anyone is
and over, in a hoarse whisper; I can’t quite make it out. watching or not.
But God knows I’ve tried. What happens there is this, and precious little it is:
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to clouds come and go as well as the round of similar
the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will seasons; a pig eats a tortoise or doesn’t eat a tortoise;
stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and Pacific waves fall up and slide back; a lichen expands;
wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is noth­ night follows day; an albatross dies and dries on a cliff;
ing there. There is nothing but those things only, those a cool current upwells from the ocean floor; fishes
created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or sway­ multiply, flies swarm, stars rise and fall, and diving
ing, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebb­ birds dive. The news, in other words, breaks on the
ing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a beaches. And taking it all in are the trees. The palo
tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the santo trees crowd the hillsides like any outdoor audi­
same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does ence; they face the lagoons, the lava lowlands, and the
utter a peep—just this one. The birds and insects, the shores.
meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and moun­ 1 have some experience of these palo santo trees.
tains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. They interest me as emblems of the muteness of the
There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if human stance in relation to all that is not human. I see
someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you us all as palo santo trees, holy sticks, together watching
everything that we watch, and growing in silence.
Annie Dillard teaches at Wesleyan University in In the Galapagos, I didn't notice the palo santo trees
Connecticut. for a long time. Like everyone else, I specialized in sea

38
 Teaching a Stone to Talk

lions. My shipmates and I liked the sea lions, and Now I no longer concurred with my shipmates’joke;
envied their lives. Their joy seemed conscious. They I no longer wanted to “come back” as a sea lion. For I
were engaged in full-time play. They were all either fat thought, and I still think, that if 1 came back to life in
or dead. By day they played in the shallows, alone or the sunlight where everything changes, I would like to
together, greeting each other and us with great noises come back as a palo santo tree, one of thousands on a
of joy, or they took a turn offshore and body-surfed in cliffside on those godforsaken islands, where a million
the breakers, exultant. By night on the sand they lay in events occur among the witless, where a splash of rain
each other’s flippers and slept. My shipmates joked, may drop on a yellow iguana the size of a dachshund,
often, that when they “came back,” they would just as and ten minutes later the iguana may blink. I would
soon do it all over again as sea lions. 1 concurred. The like to come back as a palo santo tree on the weather
sea lion game looked unbeatable. side of an island, so that I could be, myself, a perfect
But, a year and a half later, 1 returned to those witness, and look, mute, and wave my arms.
unpeopled islands. In the interval my attachment to
them had shifted, and my memories of them had The siience is all there is. It is the alpha and the
altered, the way memories do, like particolored pebbles omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters;
rolled back and forth over a grating, so that after a time it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the
those hard bright ones, the ones you thought you whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction
would never lose, have vanished, passed through the to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to
grating, and only a few big, unexpected ones remain, “ World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray
no longer unnoticed but now selected out for some without ceasing. □
meaning, large and unknown.
Such were the palo santo trees. Before, 1 had never
given them a thought. They were just miles of half­
dead trees on the red lava sea cliffs of some deserted
islands. They were only a name in a notebook: “ Palo ART by Michael Harris
santo— those strange white trees.” Look at the sea
lions! Look at the flightless cormorants, the penguins,
I want to be the man
the iguanas, the sunset! But after eighteen months the
wonderful cormorants, penguins, iguanas, sunsets, and in Rodin’s The Kiss
even the sea lions had dropped from my holey heart. 1 or Brancusi’s The Kiss
returned to the Galapagos to see the palo santo trees.
They are thin, pale, wispy trees. You walk among I want to be among
them on the lowland deserts, where they grow beside the essential
the prickly pear. You see them from the water on the
kissers of all time
steeps that face the sea, hundreds together small and
thin and spread, and so much more pale than their red
soils that any black-and-white print of them looks like I know a kiss
a negative. Their stands look like blasted orchards. At is just a kiss
every season they all seem newly dead, pale and bare as is just a cushioned push
birches drowned in a beaver pond—for at every season
they look leafless, paralyzed, and mute. But, in fact,
of face, a slippery wash
you can see during the rainy months a few meager
deciduous leaves here and there on their brittle twigs. of lips that blush
And hundreds of lichens always grow on their bark in then turn to ice, to fall
overlapping explosions which barely enlarge in the
course of the decade, lichens pink and orange, laven­ lake-ice, to ice as
der, yellow, and green. The palo santo trees bear the delicate as lace
lichens effortlessly, unconsciously, the way they bear
as hard and cold as love
everything. Their multitudes, transparent as line draw­
ings, crowd the cliffsides like whirling dancers, like
empty groves, and look out over cliff-wrecked breakers whose dream is seed
toward more unpeopled islands, with their freakish liz­ and bitter red and not
ards and birds, toward the grieving lagoons and the these soft kisses, breathless
bays where the sea lions wander, and beyond to the
clamoring seas.

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