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| Balthasar van der Ast Sea Shells ca. 1640 oil on panel Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona |
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| Johann Rudolf Byss Large Scallop Shell with Flowers and Goldfinch 1694 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Pier Leone Ghezzi Shell Ornament 1726 drawing British Museum |
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| Sarah Stone Shells 1781 watercolor on paper National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Richard Daintree Granite Rocks, The Anakies ca. 1864 albumen print National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Richard Daintree Two Shells ca. 1865-70 albumen silver print National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Carleton Watkins Seal Rocks off San Francisco ca. 1866-68 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Elizabeth Eaton Burton Lily Lamp ca. 1905-1910 hammered copper and abalone shells Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California |
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| Henry Schnakenberg Shell and Lemons 1929 oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Paul Klee Rocks at Night 1939 watercolor and ink on paper Guggenheim Museum, New York |
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| Yutaka Ohashi Stone Garden 1955 oil with metal leaf on canvas Guggenheim Museum, New York |
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| Gertrude Hermes Stonehenge 1959 color linocut British Museum |
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| Larry Schwarm Limestone, Chase County, Kansas 1974 gelatin silver print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Richard Benson Stones of Newport 1977-78 palladium print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Merrill Mahaffey Toroweap Rock II 1978 acrylic on canvas Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Arnold Zageris Fractured Rock of Labrador 1993 C-print National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |
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| Agathe Snow Curiously Civilized, Old Rock Creations, Childproof, Easter Island, Stonehenge 2010 assemblage of mixed materials Guggenheim Museum, New York |
Barbara Epstein
Sometime near dawn, driving a stolen car
So fast I will never arrive,
Floating without a destination and without a license
Along the empty highways across the Mississippi from St. Louis,
Just the occasional big interstate truck's
Prong of headlights sticking into the dark
Through the misty summer odor of to get away!
At age fifteen, too young to drive or drink –
Is what I did a lot of, with a lot of drink,
And the driver's-side window open
To loll my head out to sniff the oncoming breeze like a dog,
Quaffing the opiate of the gigantic fields of Illinois,
Sucking in deep breaths of the husky
Thick bittersweet bituminous
Rising already at this early hour from the factory smokestacks
Of collapsing factories made of roseate bricks.
Ecstatic, as though of prednisone I had drunk,
And that cold black earth smell out in the boondocks.
And Vergil takes me by the hand as we descend
To meet the shades of Homer, Ovid, Horace, Lucan.
And I stop to give those greats a ride at dawn
And in their company at sunrise whoosh to wherever I belong
On wings of song.
How in the world does this connect to Barbara Epstein?
This is a way of bringing flowers to her shrine.
If I'm constantly stealing my father's cars, forever, she is forever
Founding co-editor of The New York Review of Books, and that's better –
Even though she nearly always canceled at the last minute
Every lunch date she ever made with anyone, or so it seemed!
One of the great editors
(And even in that wicked world everyone revered her)
Could be relied on to cancel
The lunch date with you she herself had made.
It was her tic nerveux to have to.
This is what happens when you think of someone no longer alive you love.
– Frederick Seidel (2018)