Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810), a German physicist, asks a question that seldom occurs to someone picking up a stone. If it feels this hard today, what was it like before? Ritter imagines that a person touching a body and feeling its resistance might catch time itself at work. In the 132nd of his posthumously published fragments, he gives the thought two short sentences.
The age of bodies lies in their rigidity. Every act of becoming solid is a process of time, of history.
– Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers, 1810, p. 81.[1]
The decisive word in the second sentence is “becoming”. To speak of solidity, one can place two finished stones side by side and compare them. To speak of becoming solid, one must imagine at least two moments with a change between them. Just before the quoted lines, Ritter lets his language enact the change. The fluid becomes solid, then the solid grows more solid still. The second step turns what first appeared to be an end state back into something happening in time.
The fragment opens with the suggestion that the oldest stones are also the hardest. Ritter soon shifts into the language of possibility. It is as though time did the hardening and history could be seen in rigidity itself. Then a complication occurs to him. A body can also become fluid again. Such reversals belong to its history just as much as its first hardening does. The hardness of a specimen taken on its own cannot tell us its geological age. Ritter’s fragment leaves someone holding a stone with a different question. What changes has this particular body passed through on the way to becoming the thing I touch today?
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Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
Meister Eckhart (um 1260–vor 1329)
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer · p. 126
Our translation from Gustav Landauer’s German rendering
The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE)
Metamorphoses · 1951 · p. 30–31
Our translation from the Latin
Perhaps this block of marble is only a heap of infinitely many living bodies, or like a lake full of fish, although the eye can ordinarily distinguish these animals only in bodies that have partly decayed.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Brief an Antoine Arnauld vom 30. April 1687 · 1846 · p. 96–97
Our translation
When you bend down towards all this activity, it is almost as if you could overhear the hidden history of how plants grow and the quiet beating of the mountain’s heart.
Very little. One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, tome II. Philosophie · p. 105
Our translation
The fleeting sunbeam has been captured and enclosed in your mysterious core.
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Excerpt. Our translation from the German edition of 1904
I thank you, silent stone, and bend down towards you: I owe you my life as a plant.
The precious stones which are the foundations denote truths Divine shining through in the ultimate of order.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
Arcana Coelestia · 1938 · p. 318
Clause from the cited English edition. Initial capital supplied.
The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.
And he the bard, a crystal soul Sphered and concentric with the whole.
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