[BelleZora]

I was also struck by the truth of this quote: "History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers." I loved the language of Fugitive Pieces and the meditations upon history and memory. Like Caleb, I did not connect to the passages about music in the way that I would have wished or expected. That surprises me because I love music. I once thought I even had a passion for it, but that was because I had not yet discovered my passion for geology and the processes of nature.

I loved the passages about the memory of nature.

We think of weather as transient, changeable, and above all, ephemeral; but everywhere nature remembers. Trees, for example , carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled. (p.211)

I was lucky enough to read this camping in Death Valley where I have felt boundless awe for the memories contained in the canyon walls, and the history of dry and wet years you can read in the washes. Northwest of here in the Bristlecone pine forest in the White Mountains there is a tree that is many hundreds years old. When it was young, lightning burned out one side and the center of the trunk. Now the tree is tall and healthy despite the gaping hole through its heart. It carries the memory and the scar of the lightning which struck it hundreds of years ago, but somehow endured and thrived. I have always found lessons and stories in nature's memories.

So did Athos and he passed on that awareness to Jakob. Here are three of the best paragraphs:

It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted.

How many centuries before the spirit forgets the body? How long will we feel our phantom skin buckling over rockface, our pulse in magnetic lines of force? How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes?

Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.

Geology gives you perspective and therefore equanimity, even serenity, when faced with the tragedies and challenges of daily life. But it cannot be much help in dealing with the cataclysmic events of the Holocaust of Fugitive Pieces, of all the other Holocausts of destroyed peoples, of the drowning of Biskupin, of all the hearts shot out of people and trees. As the first sentence of the book states: Time is a blind guide.