It seems churlish to write of anything but the unfolding horror in Ukraine, an ugly reminder of the brute power of powerful brutes. One prays that humanity's better angels can stave off the worse, or at least push them to stop each other, but the scenes of deliberate destruction, designed to terrify, confront us with the reality some of us needed to learn from Elaine Scarry that war, whatever its mythology, is about attrition in the destruction of human bodies and the worlds that human bodies need to live. How to stop war once it's been unleashed, how to stop it from spreading?
These outcroppings of Hartland Schist in Pelham Bay Park have nothing to say on the question.
