This began as a claim, that stones are microcosmic ruins.
(“Rocks” would have worked better alliteratively, but in my professional jargon
there’s a precise definitional difference: rock becomes stone at the quarry
face, and anyway there’s a nice consonance with the nasal finishes of stones and
ruins. I don’t mean that you can smell them, but of course under the right
conditions you can.)
That stones are microcosmic ruins. And not because the
classic ruin is built of stone (though reinforced concrete is an up-and-comer),
but because all the temporality is condensed. You’ve got the human-made thing,
you’ve got the visible signs of impermanence, you’ve got impermanence that
nevertheless outstrips any single mortal lifespan, usually.
The basic Latin word for stone is lapis. That evolved
into Italian lapide, which usually means a tombstone.
What got me thinking about it was walking down the
street, across the piazza, all paved with a greenish-grey and softish stone
that I don’t know well yet*, having only recently arrived in Pisa; and it’s
recommenced raining here today, so all the pitting and the concavities worn by
the passage of feet are accentuated, playing the role of a thousand dirty mirrors.
*(It’s so-called pietra serena, the stonecutters’ term for a variety of macigno,
which was formed about 23 million years ago.)
What got me thinking about it was a book review I’m
behind in finishing, a review of a book about stone. Actually, those are both
excuses: I’m almost always thinking about stones and time. Rocks and time.
Unless it’s pots and time. World enough and.
But reviewing this particular book, I was called to read
again, for the umpteenth time, with newer but not younger eyes, a passage from
the elder Pliny (HN 36.166): tofus aedificiis inutilis est
mortalitate mollitia, “tuff is useless for construction because of its
mortality, its softness.” Latin mortalitas, even if rare classically, is
the ability and the necessity to die, mortality. Even a rock can die. Because of
its softness, mollitia.
Tuff can die; but it can also be born. Vitruvius (2.6.1) et
ibi quod nascitur tofus exsurgens, “and the tuff which is born there rising
up”- sure, nascor can have the sense of “arise, be produced, be found,”
but its basic meaning is to be born.
All rocks are born, all rocks will die. The softer tuffs
are one of the rare examples where both can happen at a more-or-less human
scale. There are softish stones, like the Pisan pietra serena sandstone pavers
that got us started, that can be visibly eroded by human passage, but they took
much longer (maybe hundreds of thousands of years) to become stone. Or there
are lavas that can harden during a single day’s eruption. The streets of Naples
are largely paved with hard, resistant blocks from flows like these from
Vesuvius that reached the sea.
Both in Pisa and in Naples, pavers bear the linear marks put
there by stonecutters to keep you from slipping, chiseled in, tap tap tap tap
tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap (I don’t yet know what sound the Pisan pavers
make when cut), but they wear away. You wear them away. These are tallymarks in reverse: you can keep a sort of time by
noting their disappearance. Actually, that’s not true. You can’t keep time.
Postscript
Walking home, I passed the Tower, and the Cathedral, and the
Baptistery, all done up in their (mostly) marble. Marble is a harder rock, and
these are harder stones, not local: in the middle ages, with their fleet, the
Pisans commandeered great quantities of marble from the ruins of Ostia at the
mouth of the Tiber. Of course, the marble was scarcely local to Ostia, either, and
for some of it shipping up to Pisa was a sort of homecoming, to just about within
eyeshot of the great white scars in the mountains about Carrara, above the
ancient town of Luna that gave its name, for a time, to the stone. But in
geologic time there is no homeland, no moment of origin. Quarrytime is just a
rite of passage, wherein rock is turned to stone. The marble around Carrara “formed”—a
temporally-fuzzy coming-into-being—a very very long time ago. A slow process that
turned those ancient, ancient seabeds first into limestone, about 200 million
years ago and then, with pressure, into marble, about 20 million years ago. And
the ocean then is the ocean now.
