Sea Shells
Sea Shells
As any beachcomber will attest, seashells are an endless source of fascination and delight, and Valéry's 1936 essay glows, as Gaston Bachelard says, with his sense of nature's "transcendental geometry". Wondering at the enormous variety of shells—the helices, the spirals, the surfaces smooth or encrusted with knobs or spines, the bulbs and concavities, the rugged outsides and the satiny surfaces within—Valery compares the "making" of human beings with that slow, continuous formation that is the "making" of nature. (Chicago Public Library)