I have often wondered what Smithson might have made of McCracken’s monolithic oddities circa 1966, or the uncannily leaning planks that soon followed, had these inspired him to write as he did on Judd’s work in the essay “The Crystal Land.”¹⁰ Noting the discrepancy between Judd’s insistently rational accounts and his eccentrically fabricated specific objects, Smithson allows that “the first time I saw Don Judd’s ‘pink plexiglas box,’ it suggested a giant crystal from another planet.” McCracken shares much of Smithson’s otherworldly sight, his metaphysical yearning. Yet he diverges from Smithson’s recourse to transcendence, from the notion that worldly physical and historical experience might be surpassed by a crystalline entropy. McCracken’s metaphysics does not end in eschatology but in empathy.