"What the Rock Says About the Caterpillar"

--an essay on life circumstances.

A veteran of a very different kind of war, I am now a rock, luckily at the surface, as opposed to the fates of many of my brothers who are trapped in perpetual darkness -- this gives me a certain perspective on time and especially animal life, the changes of the seasons, onslaught of day and night which my brethren never see. No, for my brethren, call them 'moles', languish in themselves unawares, lacking either memory or anticipation of times to come, they are literally rocks and nothing more. Me, though a rock, I pen essays. This predilection redounds to me from an earlier life in which I was not a rock but a man.

Yes, earlier life: reincarnation, entelechy, transubstantiation -- I do not know many Greek terms. Deficiency of my past educations. Still, for a rock I'm doing well, I'm articulate.

You might expect a rock to suffer under a high degree of neuroticism, but that's not the case with rocks: disease, illness, psychosis -- these are the realm of feeling creatures. I feel only vague intimations of the passage of time and the footfalls of feeling creatures. Yes, the footfalls, but from them I construe a great deal. I have so much time to go construing, I'm a rock resting atop a low hill -- thank God not the Himalayas, which I remember too. No, this hill is only about 5,000 feet above sea-level. And thank goodness, since most of the year I'm exposed to sun and moon. This opens worlds to me. Without sun and moon I'd be a silly rock.

Still, with time and distance I feel my articulation sliding away. It seems even rocks are destined for the pit.

In the meantime I am able to speak with an uncanny, rock-like degree of detachment about feeling creatures, having been one only in the distant past. I have nonetheless to thank these feeling creatures for the degree of articulation I do possess, along with the sun, the moon, wind and dust. No, it is impossible to say what proportion of gratitude I owe to feeling creatures, as compared with these elements: it would perhaps be an overwrought calculation.

Time presses, if not upon myself then upon my readers. We rocks are typically scornful of time, though even we have futures to anticipate, destinies which seem almost changeable to us. Our efforts go unrealized; for most of us time results in a turning-inwards, toward the dark, undifferentiated heart of our rocky depths. Too many of us -- I speak from supposition -- forget the realities of time and change to such an extent that --

Well, of certain things I cannot write. A rock has limits after all. If he would not change he had best embrace eternal silence. He had best peer out from himself. Thus may even rocks seek education.

Who imagines a demonic rock? Only demons. A demonic rock would destroy time itself. A black -- what is it? -- hole. That's a demonic rock, the thing I fear most of all. And for a rock fear is not a feeling but a vague intimation of times to come -- of undifferentiated darkness.