The world is a whole one, continuous if uneven. This wholeness can't very well be broken into parts without the kind of effort that pushes the parts out of joint, like cracking a rock to expose the fossil: what wonder to see the shell that has lurked for a million years bound up in the bonds of the rock! But also something is now over and done in that hammer blow, a deliberate stroke, over and above the everyday effort that allows us to pick our way through the rock-strewn shore. The petrified shape exposed in the rock is now left in the open, to be worn away by the familiarity created by its accessibility. No longer a constant furrow buried in a stone, silently ploughing its line in the thick of the world, it is now here, expressed from its bed, worn under light and water and foot, under a gaze, which is nowhere.

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