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Edited by Dava Sobel
I name them Upright, Lengthwise, Split Down the Middle: these granites strewn like milky stars. You could orient by them, find your way through creek, meadow, and wood. This one is here, and that one is there, its neighbor next to both, old friends grinding down shards of philosophy. It could take a million years to see the argument to conclusion, points split finer and finer, rubbed to a sheen, into pebbles, then to sand in an hourglass. They record the course of floods, huddle together beneath parent slopes where they were wrenched and scraped by glaciers, shaped and molded by teachers of ice, which explains their patience and hardness, having been milled so interminably slowly to an exacting rule. Now they languish, sun seeping into feldspars and micas, into the quartzes until they quiver with pure excitation—in heat and cold, wind and stillness, through minutes and millennia— and still radiate impassiveness.
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