“Consider a largish rock, about three feet in diameter, its irregular bulk reposing on the ground… there is such a rock resting just outside the studio where I sit writing [these words] … I glance at it now through the window, offering its shade to the clumped grasses, implacable in its solidity – a familiar and stable presence amid all my whirling thoughts… After I’ve been adrift in these words and sentences for a long stretch, I look up and find that rock, once again, poised in the same stance, holding its familiar shape against the trees and the blue sky, although the shadow it casts upon the ground has now shifted. I return to my work. After an hour or so, it calls my gaze once again; the sky behind the rock is now dense with cloud, and so its shadow has been subsumed within the common shade – yet the stone still maintains its earlier stance. I’m suddenly struck by the immense exertion it would take to hold myself in such a stable posture, moment after moment, without flinching. To sustain itself in that position, steadily, so that even now it is still bearing that very shape, and still again, and yet again, hour after hour, and day after day – that must take a lot of effort! Not of course that the rock has to deal with the kind of mad restlessness that besets a muscled being like myself. Yet simply to hold itself together in a cosmos that is steadily flying apart, to prevail, year after year, against the suck of entropy, seems already to entail a kind of stubbornness, an obdurate persistence that we miss when we think of “being” or bare existence, as a purely passive state. And so I find myself staring at this rock with a new astonishment – a new appreciation for its compacted energy, the wild activity that it displays by its simple presence.”