The Hebrew book of Habakkuk gives a prophet the task of speaking about injustice embodied in a house. A person who has acquired security at someone else’s expense wants to make that security last. A thick wall serves the purpose well. It turns away inquisitive eyes and separates the people outside from those who live within. In the second chapter this very protection acquires the unexpected authority of a witness.
For even the stones in the wall will cry out, and the rafters in the timberwork will answer them.
– Book of Habakkuk, The Bible, 1922, p. 889.[1]
A stone belongs to the house because someone carried it there and set it in place. When it calls out from the wall, the labour and the history of that act begin to matter. The finished surface of a building generally tells us little about who paid for its materials or in what circumstances they were used. In the prophet’s saying the hidden history becomes audible. Its voice comes from inside the possession the owner thought he had secured for himself.
The timber answers the stone. A reader can imagine the call travelling from the masonry to the roof. Two different materials support the same testimony, much as two human witnesses might. The accusation concerns the person who founded his house on injustice. Stone and wood receive the power to tell how that happened. It is a striking image of memory attached to a place. A building may outlast its owner’s willingness to speak about the circumstances in which it rose.
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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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