by Feng
Man envies their hardnes, endurance, intransigeance and luster, their being smooth and impenetrable, whole even when broken. They are fire and water in one transparent immortality, visited now by a rainbow, now by mist. Fitting in his palm, they bring him the purity, the cold and the distance of stars, their several serenities.”—Roger Caillois
“[Roger Caillois’] passionate inquiry into the mineral world he has discovered leads him now—perhaps for the first time—to identify with all its fragments, to the point of learning and adopting its writing, tot he point of setting up—himself having become the object, the burst stone—an exemplary notebook of correspondences that will push him by and by into defining himself through a new mythology, a metaphysics, a morality, an aesthetic of regions beyond time, where life and death are synonyms.” – Edmond Jabes
