A Story About A Rock That No Rock Will Ever Know Because Rocks Don't Have Brains

"Rock" is a word used for so many hard somethings on planet earth. It is hardly a properly descriptive word for so varied a subject. Two "rocks" might be made up of entirely different substances and have an entirely different history of being something else in the past, squashed down by tectonic forces to become solid. But humans refer to all these wonderful and varied objects by one word. Human language, it would seem, has very little to do with the object in question and much more to do with describing things as they are useful to humans. Thus, hard, somewhat heavy things are all lumped under the same vague category "rocks."

One particular rock amongst the billions of hard, somewhat heavy things on planet earth had broken off from a massive hunk of limestone nearly two thousand years prior. Since then, it had moved only slightly away from the shear rock cliff from which it had broken off. It sat at the base, where the hard stuff met the soft stuff humans call "sand.”

Rocks, no matter what they are made of, cannot move on their own or even think. They have no appendages and no brain and no moving parts at all. If you break a rock in half, it becomes two rocks, and no one died in the process. So why focus on this one rock, the one who broke off from the massive hunk of limestone and then barely moved for two thousand years? The answer is simple. Unbeknownst to the rock, since, as I explained before, rocks cannot beknownst anything at all, three thousand years ago, a well-paid human had applied a chisel to one surface of the that massive hunk of limestone. He had applied a hammer to the chisel and sculpted some intricate shapes that humans call “words” on the surface of the limestone. A thousand years later, our friend the rock broke off from the limestone, taking some of the words with it on its surface.

Two thousand years after that, a man found it, our chunk of limestone, and saw the words written on its side. He took it from its home at the base of the cliff and carried it away. After that, it passed between a dozen greedy sweaty human hands, always in exchange for some paper stuff that humans call “money.” One greedy sweaty human kept the rock in his house, hidden from the world, but he died, and the things he had piled up around himself in that house were all given away.

The rock was given to a museum, and they put it in an exhibit. Thousands of humans walked by, looked at it, and held their breath, thinking of the things it had seen, the ancient humans who had touched it, the message they had left behind. Somehow, the rock became something more than a hard, somewhat heavy thing in the eyes of humans. They still named it “rock,” but also named it “history” and “art.” The rock did not know what it was before or after its gained these new names and became worth money and was placed in a museum. Names only exist inside human brains, kept secret from everyone else and passed between them like wind across leaves. To the rocks and sand and paper, a rock just is, even with intricate shapes chiseled on it, just like you and I just are, black or white, male or female, dead or alive. Humans don’t think about that, because then what would be the difference between them and a rock?