Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard

pulled my jacket collar up as high as I could.
    He described stepping on the snake; he rolled his eyes and tried to stir me. “I felt it just… move under my foot. It was so… slimy…. ” I bided my time. His teeth were chattering. “We were walking through the field beneath the cemetery. I called, ‘Wait, Father, wait!’ I couldn’t lift my foot.” I wondered what they let him read; he spoke in prose, like le bourgeois gentilhomme .
    â€œGee,” I kept saying, “you must have been scared.”
    â€œWell, I was about knee-deep in honeysuckle.”
    Oh! That was different. Probably he really had stepped on a snake. I would have been plenty scared myself, knee-deep in honeysuckle, but there was no way now to respond to his story all over again, identically but sincerely. Still, it was time to go. It was dark. The marehad nosed her golden foal into the barn. The creek below held a frail color still, the memory of a light that hadn’t yet been snuffed.
    We parted sadly, over the barbed-wire fence. The boy lowered his enormous, lighted eyes, lifted his shoulders, and went into a classic trudge. He had tried again to keep me there. But I simply had to go. It was dark, it was cold, and I had a roast in the oven, lamb, and I don’t like it too well done.

Lenses
    Y OU GET USED TO LOOKING THROUGH LENSES ; it is an acquired skill. When you first look through binoculars, for instance, you can’t see a thing. You look at the inside of the barrel; you blink and watch your eyelashes; you play with the focus knob till one eye is purblind.
    The microscope is even worse. You are supposed to keep both eyes open as you look through its single eyepiece. I spent my childhood in Pittsburgh trying to master this trick: seeing through one eye, with both eyes open. The microscope also teaches you to move your hands wrong, to shove the glass slide to the right if you are following a creature who is swimming off to the left—as if you were operating a tiller, or backing a trailer, or performing any other of those paradoxical maneuverswhich require either sure instincts or a grasp of elementary physics, neither of which I possess.
    A child’s microscope set comes with a little five-watt lamp. You place this dim light in front of the microscope’s mirror; the mirror bounces the light up through the slide, through the magnifying lenses, and into your eye. The only reason you do not see everything in silhouette is that microscopic things are so small they are translucent. The animals and plants in a drop of pond water pass light like pale stained glass; they seem so soaked in water and light that their opacity has leached away.
    The translucent strands of algae you see under a microscope—Spirogyra, Oscillatoria, Cladophora—move of their own accord, no one knows how or why. You watch these swaying yellow, green, and brown strands of algae half mesmerized; you sink into the microscope’s field forgetful, oblivious, as if it were all a dream of your deepest brain. Occasionally a zippy rotifer comes barreling through, black and white, and in a tremendous hurry.
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    My rotifers and daphniae and amoebae were in an especially tremendous hurry because they were drying up. I burnt out or broke my little five-watt bulb right away. To replace it, I rigged an old table lamp laid on its side; the table lamp carried a seventy-five-watt bulb. I was about twelve, immortal and invulnerable, and did not know what I was doing; neither did anyone else. My parents let me set up my laboratory in the basement, where they wouldn’t have to smell the urine I collected in test tubes and kept in the vain hope it would grow something horrible. So in full, solitary ignorance I spent evenings in the basement staring into a seventy-five-wattbulb magnified three hundred times and focused into my eye. It is a wonder I can see at all. My eyeball itself would start drying up; I blinked and