Kahlil Gibran sitting on the bank with his hand extended over the water

The circles a pebble makes

Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), a Lebanese-American writer and artist, lets a pebble speak in his English collection Sand and Foam. What happens when a stone drops into a lake is easy enough to watch from the shore. Gibran gives the account to the one traveller who can carry it further. The pebble can tell us what happens on the part of its journey that takes place after a watcher has lost sight of it.

Who makes the circles?

The story opens with a throw. God supplies the movement, but as soon as the stone strikes the lake, the subject of the sentence changes. The pebble takes responsibility for the disturbance. There is something surprising in the scale of its account. A single small body hits the surface at a single point, yet its trace spreads across an ever wider area in more rings than anyone could count.

When God threw me, a pebble, into this wondrous lake I disturbed its surface with countless circles. But when I reached the depths I became very still.

– Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam, 1961, p. 5.[1]

Following the stone down

The second sentence goes with the stone as it sinks. The circles overhead might still be visible. The speaker can no longer tell us whether they last, or when they disappear. It has one thing left to report from the depths, and that is how still it has become. The final word belongs to a stone describing its own quiet from within.

Someone watching from the bank could go on seeing the effects of the splash. Following the pebble instead gives us another measure of the same event. Its public trace and the traveller’s private experience may run on quite different clocks.