Substance Journal

"Natural Currency" (limestone)

"The more unusual, definite, and undeniable the image, the more the stone is prized... They should not exist, and yet they do, at once impossible and inescapable. At the same time, they are treasures, the results of thousands upon thousands of chances, the winning number in an infinite lottery.... They have no market rate or price. Their value is not commercial and cannot be calculated in any currency.... It depends solely on the covetousness, pride and competitiveness generated by the desire to possess or the pleasure of possessing them. Each stone, as unique and irreplaceable as a work of genius, is a valuable at once pointless and priceless, with which the laws of economics have nothing to do" (The Writing of Stones, 11).

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  1. Roger Caillois Mineral Collection Paul A. Harris

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