Sometimes there is a bit of verse or a piece of writing that truly takes hold of my imagination. I found this wonderful parable in a collection of various kinds of writing in a Norton Anthology, fourth or fifth edition, when I taught an exposition course fifty or so years ago. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was there, I remember. The parable of the Good Samaritan was probably there too, but I don’t remember. I suspect I had the students try their hand at such a genre, but I don’t remember that either. Tergvinder, however, and his boulder I never forgot, for there are days in my life, like today for example, when Merwin’s parable seems to express exactly the quality of my own life.
The Internet is a magical thing, an astonishing thing. I hadn’t thought of Tergvinder in a long time, and I got rid of that Norton text year ago, I think. While I didn’t remember the author’s name, I could never forget Tergvinder’s name or his boulder. I typed in the title and there it was, under, I kid you not, a full screen image of a bright red Swingline stapler; at least I think it was a Swingline. It was certainly large and bright red. I was at first appalled by the image, but then I saw Tergvinder down at the very bottom of the page, in a very tiny font, after all those years. Magical!
There is, of course, one more thing to add:
And I do hasten to add (before my eyes completely give out tonight) that this parable also calls up for me Saint Augustine’s well known line from the “Confessions”: “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” In my mind Merwin’s parable and Augustine’s famous affirmation oddly go together. Sometimes, however, all one seems to get is the boulder. Sometimes, for a moment or two, it’s enough.
Tergvinder's Stone
One time my friend Tergvinder brought a large round boulder into his living room. He rolled it up the steps with the help of some two-by-fours, and when he got it out into the middle of the room, where some people have coffee tables (though he had never had one there himself) he left it. He said that was where it belonged.
It is really a plain-looking stone. Not as large as Plymouth Rock by a great deal, but then it does not have all the claims of a big shaky promotion campaign to support. That was one of the things Tergvinder said about it. He made no claims at all for it, he said. It was other people who called it Tergvinder's Stone. All he said was that according to him it belonged there.
His dog took to peeing on it, which created a problem (Tergvinder had not moved the carpet before he got the stone to where he said it belonged). Their tomcat took to squirting it too. His wife fell over it quite often at first and it did not help their already strained marriage. Tergvinder said there was nothing to be done about it. It was in the order of things. That was a phrase he seldom employed, and never when he conceived that there was any room left for doubt.
He confided in me that he often woke in the middle of the night, troubled by the ancient, nameless ills of the planet, and got up quietly not to wake his wife, and walked through the house naked, without turning on any lights. He said that at such times he found himself listening, listening, aware of how some shapes in the darkness emitted low sounds like breathing, as they never did by day. He said he had become aware of a hole in the darkness in the middle of the living room, and out of that hole a breathing, a mournful dissatisfied sound of an absence waiting for what belonged to it, for something it had never seen and could not conceive of, but without which it could not rest. It was a sound, Tergvinder said, that touched him with fellow-feeling, and he had undertaken - oh, without saying anything to anybody - to assuage, if he could, that wordless longing that seemed always on the verge of despair. How to do it was another matter, and for months he had circled the problem, night and day, without apparently coming any closer to a solution. Then one day he had seen the stone. It had been there all the time at the bottom of his drive, he said, and he had never really seen it. Never recognized it for what it was. The nearer to the house he had got it, the more certain he had become. The stone had rolled into its present place like a lost loved one falling into arms that have long ached for it.
Tergvinder says that now on nights when he walks through the dark house he comes and stands in the living room doorway and listens to the peace in the middle of the floor. He knows it size, its weight, the touch of it, something of what is thought of it. He knows that it is peace. As he listens, some hint of that peace touches him too. Often, after a while, he steps down into the living room and goes and kneels beside the stone and they converse for hours in silence - a silence broken only by the sound of his own breathing.
W. S. Merwin
