Plausible Story kindly contributes to the Interweb with this rock-solid excerpt:
There was a wall in him that no one reached. Not even Clara, though she assumed it had deformed him. A tiny stone swallowed years back that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not shed it. His motive for hiding it had probably extinguished itself years earlier. . . . Patrick and his small unimportant stone. It had entered him at the wrong time in his life. Then it had been a flint of terror. He could have easily turned aside at the age of seven or twenty, and just spat it out and kept on walking, and forgotten it by the next street corner.
So we are built.
—from Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion
It seems to me that we can take on these stones at any time in life, and they calcify at different rates, and then they are like psychological or spiritual kidney stones, which cause a lot of anguish to eliminate, depending on how long we’ve held them and how deeply they’ve calcified. What we need is a selective, fast-acting, stone-melting technology product! ;)
This is probably all too much thought applied to some beautiful poetic prose, but such is the intricate New England stone wall I have built, with the help of many others.