The Lives of Rocks
“When we came into this country, runaways, renegades, we were like birds that had to sing. It was only ten years ago, but it feels like a hundred, or maybe a thousand. No person can know what a thousand years feels like, though in the first part of my life I was a geologist and was comfortable holding a footlong core of earth and examining such time—a thousand years per inch.
In the section of my life after that one, I was an artist, a writer of brief stories in which I was comfortable holding a... sheaf of ten or twelve papers in which a lifetime, even several lifetimes, had passed. A few thousand people would read my slim books. They would write letters to me then and talk about the characters in those stories as if they were real people, which strangely saddened me.
Then came the third life. I became an activist. It was as if some wall or dam had burst within me, so that everything I wrote had to be asking for something—petition signatures, letters to Congress, and so on—instead of giving something.MoreLess
In the section of my life after that one, I was an artist, a writer of brief stories in which I was comfortable holding a... sheaf of ten or twelve papers in which a lifetime, even several lifetimes, had passed. A few thousand people would read my slim books. They would write letters to me then and talk about the characters in those stories as if they were real people, which strangely saddened me.
Then came the third life. I became an activist. It was as if some wall or dam had burst within me, so that everything I wrote had to be asking for something—petition signatures, letters to Congress, and so on—instead of giving something.MoreLess
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