Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane
matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined
metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt
rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from
the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the
elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons
who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological
enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life. Although
geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues
that stone's endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world
in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a
profound challenge to modernity's disenchantments. Its agency
undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a
bifurcation that renders nature "out there," a mere resource for
recreation, consumption, and exploitation. Written with great verve
and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for
interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major
contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept
-"Geophilia," "Time," "Force," and "Soul"-Cohen seamlessly brings
together a wide range of topics including stone's potential to
transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time,
the "petrification" of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear,
the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and
nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across
millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether
stones reproduce and have souls. Showing that what is often assumed
to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless
and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to
Iceland a land that, writes the author, "reminds us that stone like
water is alive, that stone like water is transient."
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