Adalbert Stifter Illustration of Adalbert Stifter and the study of the earth

Learning to read the earth

Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868), an Austrian writer, gives the young narrator of Der Nachsommer a reason to reconsider the value of his collection of stones. On his early journeys nearly every discovery seemed worth taking home. As he grows more experienced, he takes fewer specimens. Looking at a mountainside, he has begun to ask a different question. How much can the stones that lie before him tell him about a landscape that has long since disappeared?

What a mountain stream leaves behind

The earth itself keeps the sources for its history within it, as in a vault of records, sources perhaps set down in millions of documents. What matters is that we learn to read them and do not falsify them through zeal and the urge to be right.

– Adalbert Stifter, Der Nachsommer, o. J., p. 183.[1]

With each flood a stream carries material away. Someone standing on its bank can watch the water rise and fall again. The same observer cannot stand long enough to see what several such streams do to an entire mountain range in the course of many lifetimes. The narrator moves between these two scales. Where a stone lay, what surrounded it, and what might have brought it to its resting place now matter as much to him as its appearance.

An archive that tests its reader

In the image of the vault, the earth has kept the records of its own history. Nobody has put them in order for the young collector or left him a key to their meaning. Reading is a skill he will have to acquire. Stifter gives that reader an unexpected adversary. The very enthusiasm that first drove him to gather and compare specimens might lead him to notice only the stones that prove him right. Coming home from an expedition with fewer stones than before can therefore be a sign of how much he has learned.