About Rocks

All I perceive is history. The rock–I’ve learned it’s a rock. I see it as the summation of all similar rocks that populate my memory. As an infant, it would have been a mysterious and incomprehensible mottled grayish lump, heavy and coarse. Even now, of course, I can study a rock to see its uniqueness among others. But this is to see its structure and its  own history–the grains of quartz or feldspar, and in them planes of atoms explaining the color and reflectivity. In this way I lose the uniqueness of that rock and it becomes explainable like all other rocks, another piece of memory for future rocks to be compared against. To know this rock, I must forget all the others.