Rock Lessons

Late in October 2018, I wrote a First Things column called “A Sense of Time,” most of which was devoted to a then-new book by Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Save the World. It is a very interesting book by a scholar who is obviously a gifted teacher. (Bjornerud is a professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.) While my specifically Christian orientation toward “timefulness” is in some respects quite different from hers, I both enjoyed her book and learned a lot from it.

Can that really have been six years ago? Oof. Suffice it to say that my “sense of time” has been severely torqued since then. But when the scholar Jon Lauck (“Mr. Midwest,” as some of us think of him) noted that Bjornerud has a new book out, I didn’t hesitate to acquire a copy of Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks, even though, had I seen the title without having read Timefulness, I would have passed: Talk about “the subtle wisdom of rocks” would usually give me a headache. (Ditto similar rhetorical moves, very popular today—the “subtle wisdom of plants,” for instance, is in high demand just now.)

But I did read Bjornerud’s book, and I’m very glad to have done so. It is to some degree a memoir while also imparting a good deal of knowledge. To give you a sense of her project, I will quote a paragraph from her prologue. If you find it off-putting, you won’t want to read the book. But if you are intrigued to hear more from a writer who sees our common world, the one we share with millions of other human beings, from an unfamiliar angle, Turning to Stone will repay your attention:

This book is an invitation into my geocentric worldview in which rocks are raconteurs, companions, mentors, oracles, and sources of existential reassurance. If my initial relationship with geology was purely intellectual, it has become over time philosophical and even transcendental, imbuing my life with meaning. My work as a field geologist has led to unlikely connections with people from across the world, friendships rooted in a shared sense of humility and wonder in the presence of nature. I also have a feeling of amity with rocks, after spending such a large fraction of my waking hours with them over many years, immersed in their narratives.

“Oh, my,” some of you may be saying. “You just can’t make this stuff up!” That’s fine. But others may be curious.

While I was reading Bjornerud’s book, a long-submerged memory came to me. In the mid-1960s, my mom, then in her early forties, started taking classes part-time at a junior college near Paradise, in northern California, where we lived at the time. Fast-forward several years: Mom and my brother, Rick, and our grandma had moved back to southern California and were living in South Pasadena. Mom was taking classes (while working) at Pasadena City College (at the time a very good junior college); later she transferred to Cal State LA, where she graduated, and where she taught for several years as an adjunct in the English Department. (For a short while, as I have related, she and I were adjuncting there at the same time!)

One of the most demanding classes Mom took at PCC was geology. The professor was exacting; he also loved his subject, and from all I could gather, he was an exceptionally good teacher. Mom poured so much effort into that class—and she loved it. The students had to gather samples of various rocks on their own; some of the rocks were easy to find, but others were not. Mom had always loved trees and flowers and birds, but this was uncharted territory for her. She threw herself into it with a passion.

I was delighted to see how much Mom enjoyed the class, although I was also bemused. To this day (and despite having made my way through the great John McPhee’s geologically centered books), I am largely ignorant of rocks—even after reading Bjornerud’s book! But I am not at all sorry to have done so—to have seen the world we all share through the eyes of someone whose perspective is radically different from my own.

There’s a danger in that: It’s easy to fall into smug self-satisfaction. “I’m so enlightened! I can read people whose outlook I don’t share.” As it happens, there were moments when I felt like throwing Turning to Stone across the room. And several times I sang a couple of stanzas of a hymn I have loved ever since I was a small boy: “Rock of Ages.” Nonetheless, I’m thankful to have read this book, and I hope that my aging brain retains at least some shards of it.

John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.

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Image by Carl Månsson, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons licensing. Image cropped.