passing a stone

Passing a stone begins as William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s explanation for an unexplained bodily episode and becomes his metaphor for leaving the university’s deanship and giving up tenure. The phrase holds together two explanations that the narrative refuses to collapse into one: a physical event Watson considers medically impossible, and a symbolic passage Devereaux considers emotionally apt.

Medical Uncertainty and the Literal Claim

The phrase arises after Devereaux’s urinary symptoms have prompted extensive medical investigation. The tests find no tumor or prostate abnormality, and he is again urinating freely and without discomfort. Phil Watson offers a tentative explanation involving stress and Devereaux’s overuse of antihistamines, but the diagnosis leaves the cause of the episode uncertain.

Devereaux supplies a more poetic account. When he hears a small plink as he urinates, he takes it as evidence that he has passed a stone. Jacob Rose finds him laughing in the men’s room, but Watson rejects the literal interpretation: a stone large enough to make an audible sound, he argues, could not pass through the ureter without causing bleeding. The expression therefore rests on a disputed inference rather than a medically confirmed event.

The Symbolic Passage

Devereaux tells Watson that his decision to turn down the dean’s position and relinquish his university tenure may have been the symbolic equivalent of passing a stone. The comparison converts a consequential professional choice into an image of something difficult being expelled or left behind, while stopping short of claiming that the bodily event actually occurred.

Watson insists that the symbolic and material worlds remain distinct. His objection gives the metaphor its central tension: Devereaux finds meaning in an experience that medicine cannot validate, while Watson maintains the boundary between interpretation and physical fact. The exchange does not resolve the medical mystery; instead, it lets the image explain why the career decision feels like a passage to Devereaux.

Irony and Significance

The disagreement is also gently comic. Watson resists Devereaux’s poetic reading, yet the narrative notes that Watson is a Roman Catholic who receives the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist. That contrast complicates his sharp division between symbol and matter without proving Devereaux’s claim: a belief in sacramental meaning does not establish that a stone was physically passed.

Passing a stone thus names both the limits and the usefulness of metaphor. It cannot settle what happened in Devereaux’s body, but it gives expressive form to his decision to leave a position and tenure at the university. The phrase makes an unresolved physical mystery resonate with a definite professional relinquishment, preserving the difference between the two even as it links them.