Pebbles Are Not Boulders

I picked up a book for its title, “Things in Nature Merely Grow.” I liked its green ombré cover in shades of moss and was familiar with the author, Yiyun Li. Soon I felt both horror and awe: this is the book Li wrote in honor of her younger son, James, who committed suicide at age 19. His older brother, Vincent, had killed himself six years earlier, at 16.

I bought the book and for these last few weeks have spent painful and illuminating hours in the author’s company. In giving words to unspeakable grief, she does not tame it.

Li invites you to sit next to her – quietly, and as long as you like – to see how she has learned to carry her sorrow. I do not believe she would call it courage, and yet it inspires.

Li begins one chapter with a maxim that she has found useful, in the aftermath of all that transpired: “Do things that make sense”…

”I could speak long monologues as Constance in King John, I could lament with loud keens as the mothers in Euripedes’s plays do, but those actions will not bring me any closer to James’ mind, only, to his absences, so those actions do not make sense. Euclid, on the other hand, made sensible reading: James had a logical mind.

Do things that make sense – which, in the immediate days after James’s death, included studying geometry, reading a textbook on linguistic logic sent by Christiane, opening myself only to people who have the real strength and understanding just to be in the starkness of my life with me for a moment.

More important to myself, do things that make sense means one must pressure one’s thoughts and recognize that some automatic thoughts are but pebbles.

The analogy of pebbles was given to me by Brigid when she stayed with us the weekend after James’s death. In a moment of self-pity, I blurted out – “Am I not the worst mother in the world?”- to which Brigid replied that we both knew the answer to that question, and we also knew the question was not a real question, only, a pebble of a question. Better kick the pebble out of your way instead of letting it stop you, she said.

If one is destined to live as a Sisyphus in an abyss, there is good sense in distinguishing a meaningful boulder from insignificant pebbles. A Sisyphus making a boulder out of a pebble would only become a comedy. In the past few months I’ve developed a habit of scrutinizing my mind: is this thought a pebble of a thought, is this worry a pebble of a worry, is this question, seemingly unanswerable, only a pebble of a question?

Right after James’s death, a thought, another pebble – which didn’t feel like a small pebble at the time – occurred to me. I wrote to Deborah about what I called my “shyness,” which was in truth a feeling of isolation. There were days when I thought that there would be no point writing from an abyss – from my abyss: people are largely outside it, and they won’t be able to understand. “How does one write with this new knowledge, knowledge of a reality that’s not likely to be understood by most people (and hopefully knowledge experienced by very few)?” I asked Deborah.

She replied that “there’s no place for shyness in writing,” and quoted the last stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “Tea at the Palazzo of Hoon”:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

The extraordinary nature of friendship with these clearheaded friends: they do not get distracted by my pebbles of questions and thoughts, and they do not indulge me in pebble-mongering. A pebble is a pebble, which will not get more due than it deserves. If I aspire to live by intuition and logic, these are the friends who are more intuitive than I am when intuition is needed, more logical than I am when my reasoning falls short.”

***

This book is, among, other things, a hymn to friendship.

***

Purple coneflower

2025 Perennial of the year, Clustered mountain mint

Rose of Sharon