Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard Page B

dimension as they neared, and I could see their ardent, straining eyes. Then I could hear the brittle blur of their wings, the blur which faded as they circled on, and the sky brightened to yellow behind them and the swans flattened and darkened and diminished as they flew. Once I lost them behind the mountain ridge; when they emerged they were flying suddenly very high, and it was like music changing key.
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    I was lost. The reeds in front of me, swaying and out of focus in the binoculars’ circular field, were translucent. The reeds were strands of color passing light like cells in water. They were those yellow and green and brown strands of pond algae I had watched so long in a light-soaked field. My eyes burned; I was watching algae wavein a shrinking drop; they crossed each other and parted wetly. And suddenly into the field swam two whistling swans, two tiny whistling swans. They swam as fast as rotifers: two whistling swans, infinitesimal, beating their tiny wet wings, perfectly formed.

Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos
    I
    F IRST THERE WAS NOTHING , and although you know with your reason that nothing is nothing, it is easier to visualize it as a limitless slosh of sea—say, the Pacific. Then energy contracted into matter, and although you know that even an invisible gas is matter, it is easier to visualize it as a massive squeeze of volcanic lava spattered inchoate from the secret pit of the ocean and hardening mute and intractable on nothing’s lapping shore—like a series of islands, an archipelago. Like: the Galápagos. Then a softer strain of matter began to twitch. It was a kind of shaped water; it flowed, hardening here and there at its tips.There were blue-green algae; there were tortoises.
    The ice rolled up, the ice rolled back, and I knelt on a plain of lava boulders in the islands called Galápagos, stroking a giant tortoise’s neck. The tortoise closed its eyes and stretched its neck to its greatest height and vulnerability. I rubbed that neck, and when I pulled away my hand, my palm was green with a slick of single-celled algae. I stared at the algae, and at the tortoise, the way you stare at any life on a lava flow, and thought: Well—here we all are.
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    Being here is being here on the rocks. These Galapagonian rocks, one of them seventy-five miles long, have dried under the equatorial sun between five and six hundred miles west of the South American continent; they lie at the latitude of the Republic of Ecuador, to which they belong.
    There is a way a small island rises from the ocean affronting all reason. It is a chunk of chaos pounded into visibility ex nihilo : here rough, here smooth, shaped just so by a matrix of physical necessities too weird to contemplate, here instead of there, here instead of not at all. It is a fantastic utterance, as though I were to open my mouth and emit a French horn, or a vase, or a knob of tellurium. It smacks of folly, of first causes.
    I think of the island called Daphnecita, little Daphne, on which I never set foot. It’s in half of my few photographs, though, because it obsessed me: a dome of gray lava like a pitted loaf, the size of the Plaza Hotel, glazed with guano and crawling with red-orange crabs. Sometimes I attributed to this island’s cliff face a surly, infantile consciousness, as though it were sulking in the silentmoment after it had just shouted, to the sea and the sky, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Or sometimes it aged to a raging adolescent, a kid who’s just learned that the game is fixed, demanding, “What did you have me for, if you’re just going to push me around?” Daphnecita: again, a wise old island, mute, leading the life of pure creaturehood open to any antelope or saint. After you’ve blown the ocean sky-high, what’s there to say? What if we the people had the sense or grace to live as cooled islands in an archipelago live, with dignity, passion, and no