(An excerpt)
How would I define pebble? It’s a bit tricky, but if I were to start by the way of description, I should say that pebble is something somewhere between rock and stone. The obvious defect of my definition is that I can’t stop there: I have to continue defining stones and rocks all the way back to the flood and perhaps even further than that, for all these rocks and stones come from one enormous ancestor; and of that fabulous body and its limbs only one judgement can be made that apparently they did not hold up. Analysis can only produce amorphous, viscous, interconnected agony, a terrible mess of its death bed and cannot awake a hero size of the world. Let us stop here for a moment to contemplate the scale and veracity of this observation, unobscured by funeral mood. The expulsion of life so ardent and glorious cannot happen without dramatic internal upheaval. This sacrifice is at the origin and serves as the main cause of the gray chaos of the earth. After convulsions and torsions of a sleeping body agitated under covers, our hero, tamed by his own consciousness, which subdues like a monstrous straitjacket, knew only a few minor outbreaks, more intimate eruptions that declined in frequency as the covering envelope became heavier and colder. And now his death and her chaos make one.
— Francis Ponge (Source)