AGATES

The living being that observes it understands that by itself it can never become as enduring or as closed off. Nor as agile or pure. It finds itself unhappy on the edge of another empire and, suddenly, a stranger in the universe: a bewildered intruder. I guess with perhaps excessive ease – out of personal obsession – the reflections, the vague dreams that can make a wanderer doubt the world from a stone enchanted by liquor, a little water that has been imprisoned in the transparent cavity of an airtight stone.

(R. CAILLOIS, Stones, p. 90)