Natalie Hart's Reviews > Entering The Stone: On Caves And Feeling Through The Dark

While I read this book as research for writing about people who live in caves, and it did provide a lot of great snippets for what people in caves experience, I found the book most valuable for its writing about grief and absence. The chapter about standing in the twilight zone of a cave -- neither in the total dark nor in the light -- was especially powerful. Ultimately, it's an exploration of ourselves and who we are when we're in a squeeze, both a physical squeeze in a cave and the emotional squeeze of grief. Hurd writes sparingly yet movingly throughout the book about her friend Jeanne's long illness and then death; her words rang true to my experiences, as well. There's still lots of cool cave stuff, talk of moon milk, different kinds of caves all over the world, adaptations of cave-dwelling animals, the ammonia stink of bat guano. But also the experience and management of fear, of the awareness of tons of rock over your head, of the absence of regular markers of life. She quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson at one point: "Under every deep a lower deep opens." That's what reading this book was like, there was always a lower deep opening.