"I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why"
About this Quote
Tracy Kidder voices a feeling many share but rarely parse: the pull of mountains, cliffs, river bluffs, and long horizons that outlast us. The certainty that they matter arrives before any argument for why they matter. That hesitation to explain is not a failure of thought but a kind of fidelity to experience. Some values announce themselves as a presence rather than a proposition.
Enduring features of the earth give scale to our lives. They hold steady across centuries while everything human churns, offering a calibration against deep time. Stand before a granite outcrop or a desert mesa and the mind reorders its urgencies. The daily noise recedes; the long game of the planet comes into view. That shift is both humbling and reassuring: our dramas are small, but they are part of a larger, lawful story.
Place also organizes memory. Landmarks anchor the stories a town tells itself, which is very much a Kidder concern. His reporting often ties human lives to particular places, the way a hospital sits in a mountain valley or a community gathers beneath a ridgeline. The rock and the ridge endure, so the people who pass through can see themselves as part of a continuity they did not choose but can choose to honor.
There is an ethical undertow here. When a feature precedes you by millions of years and will likely outlast you by millions more, it discourages the fantasy that everything is up for grabs. It invites care rather than conquest, and attention rather than extraction. Yet the appeal is not only moral or ecological. It is aesthetic and metaphysical, a wordless recognition that stability itself can be beautiful.
Kidder’s admitted vagueness respects the way such importance resists tidy summary. The mind may not be able to be clear about exactly why, but the body knows. The heart knows. Endurance has meaning beyond what we can name, and sometimes the best witness to that meaning is a quiet assent.
Enduring features of the earth give scale to our lives. They hold steady across centuries while everything human churns, offering a calibration against deep time. Stand before a granite outcrop or a desert mesa and the mind reorders its urgencies. The daily noise recedes; the long game of the planet comes into view. That shift is both humbling and reassuring: our dramas are small, but they are part of a larger, lawful story.
Place also organizes memory. Landmarks anchor the stories a town tells itself, which is very much a Kidder concern. His reporting often ties human lives to particular places, the way a hospital sits in a mountain valley or a community gathers beneath a ridgeline. The rock and the ridge endure, so the people who pass through can see themselves as part of a continuity they did not choose but can choose to honor.
There is an ethical undertow here. When a feature precedes you by millions of years and will likely outlast you by millions more, it discourages the fantasy that everything is up for grabs. It invites care rather than conquest, and attention rather than extraction. Yet the appeal is not only moral or ecological. It is aesthetic and metaphysical, a wordless recognition that stability itself can be beautiful.
Kidder’s admitted vagueness respects the way such importance resists tidy summary. The mind may not be able to be clear about exactly why, but the body knows. The heart knows. Endurance has meaning beyond what we can name, and sometimes the best witness to that meaning is a quiet assent.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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