Hearts of Stone
By Faith Monahan
In middle school, I bought a small, smokey rose quartz at the Burlington Mall in Massachusetts. It’s just a simple commercial item, and there are thousands of them, but this one has stayed with me throughout the last 6 or 7 years. From middle school until freshman year of college does not sound like such a large span of time, but it’s been almost a third of my life. Looking back on the arc of this incredibly transformative chapter, I am curious which symbols will shortly conclude their stories in my life and which symbols will I continue to find and attach meaning to as they arise.In senior of high school, my friend Moni gave me a rose quartz necklace for Secret Santa that I wear often. At Trinity, I have a friend who happens to keep a small rose quartz stone on her desk as well. Pink continues to be one of my favorite colors. I guess that means this symbol will continue to still go on with me. Noticing these symbols feels like I’m finding satisfying life parallels. I also just find rose quartz to be very pretty, and it’s something that feels very poetic to me: the color is a soft and blushing pink, but the surface is hard and textured. Although pretty, her weight is not airy or light but solid like a rock. It’s semiprecious: she is not a precious diamond, but she’s more down to earth than that. Rose quartz have often been used to symbolize love, and some even claim that the stone can bring love about. I don’t really believe in the supernaturality of rose quartz but considering the prompt of a “found” object, I wonder if it helps people “find” the love in their life. It may not actually bring it about – or maybe it does, who am I to say – but it may help some people pay more attention and give more thoughtfulness to love. I struggled to find historic and researched information about this object, but I did find lots of small statues and dishware carved out of rose quartz often originating in China. Here are two examples from the Metropolitan Art Museum and Harvard Art Museum.
During class on the 26th of March, my response to a prompt asking what I would like to do before I died or something I would like to do on stage was, “to be in love.” Sometimes I wonder if I will feel love: is it rare? Some people go their whole lives without falling into romantic love, and I wonder if I would be okay without that. As a young woman, marriage and being love obsessed gets pointed out again and again through studying roles of women in history or discussing gender when reading about past literary periods. In my economics 101 class, I can feel a very masculine dominance/presence that sometimes makes me feel out of place. As my self-esteem as improved over the years, so has my comfortability with being a young woman in male dominated spaces. During my junior year of high school, I played Ophelia in Hamlet, and I recently revisited this character in a class at Trinity on Shakespeare. I thought about the ways I relate to her more and less now that 2 years have passed. This may sound like I take myself too seriously, but my favorite characters often become semi-people to me: they are part me, part something else, and they haunt me like friendly ghosts. My characters and I have had very unfortunate romantic relationships. They poignantly remind me that, “Life mimics art.” Although I have played characters in relationships, I am not sure if I have ever played a character who falls in love.
Bibliography
Flower holder with pomegranate. 18th century. The MET Museum, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/44113. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021.
Rose Quartz Stand for Small Jade Circular Covered Box. 1644-1911. Harvard Art Museums, harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/205589?position=198. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021.
