About this title: This is the question posed by the French poet-philosopher Paul Valery in his engaging meditation on the aesthetics of the seashell. As any beachcomber will attest, seashells are an endless source of fascination and delight, and Valery'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 ...
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