even*cleveland: 'a piece of s---'

'a piece of s---'

'The pearl,' says Bari, 'is the opposite of the diamond, which is completely mineral, the hardest thing known in nature. The pearl is soft, the product of a living organism. Its mystique lies in the mystery of its creation. The ancient Greeks believed pearls were formed from the tears of the gods. In Christian times the birth of the pearl was seen as a kind of immaculate conception, symbolising purity and closely associated with the Virgin Mary.'

In fact, as he goes on to explain, the pearl is just 'a piece of s---': generally a tapeworm larva that gets stuck inside the shell of a mollusc. The shellfish reacts to protect itself, building up layers of shell tissue, called nacre – or mother of pearl – around the invading particle.

Mark Hudson, "Pearls: the tears of the gods." The Telegraph 17 September 2013.

Photo of pearls forming in the shell from the American Museum of Natural History.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

'a piece of s---'

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