… But the making of the shell is lived, not calculated …
Continuing through the essay ‘Man and the Sea Shell’ found in Paul Valéry: An Anthology (1956: 1977):
… Still, one element of a human work is lacking. I do not see the utility of this thing [the shell he has made by hand]; it calls to mind no need which it satisfies. It has intrigued me; it delights my eyes and fingers; I stop to look at it as I would to listen to a melody; and unconsciously I consign it to oblivion, for we unthinkingly withhold the future from whatever is of no use to us.
… If I have dwelt at some length on the act of a man who might apply himself to making a sea shell, it is because in my opinion one should never lose an opportunity to compare, in some detail, our way of making things with the work performed by what we call nature. Nature: that is to say, the genetrix, the producer. Whenever we run across something we do not know how to make but that appears to be made, we say that nature produced it.
… All the rest — everything that we can assign neither to thinking man nor to nature’s power of generation — we attribute to “chance.” The word is an excellent invention. It is very convenient to have a word which enables us to say that a remarkable thing (remarkable in itself or in its immediate effects) is brought about in exactly the same way as something else that is not remarkable. But to say that a thing is remarkable is to bring in a man — a person who is particularly sensitive to it, and it is this person who supplies everything that is remarkable about it.
[line break added] What difference does it make to me, if I have no lottery ticket, whether one number or another is picked out of the urn? I have not been “sensitized” to the event. For me there is no “chance” in the drawing, no contrast between the uniform way in which these numbers are drawn and the inequality of the consequences. Take away man and his expectation, and everything comes out the same, sea shell or stone; but chance makes nothing in this world, apart from making us take notice of it.
… I have said that we undertake our works on the basis of several kinds of freedom: freedom with respect to material, with respect to size and shape, with respect to time; the mollusk seems deprived of all these — a creature that can only recite its lesson, which is hardly distinguishable from its very existence. Full of fancy as it may seem (so many so that we borrow certain of our ornamental motifs from it), the mollusk’s work, never retouched, unmarred by changes or reservations, is a fancy that repeats itself indefinitely; we cannot even see why certain eccentrics among the gastropods should work leftward where others work to the right.
[line break added] Still less do we understand the oddly shaped complexities that some shells disclose; or those spines and spots of color, to which we vaguely ascribe some utility that escapes us, without even stopping to think that, outside of man’s little intellectual sphere, our idea of the useful has no meaning. These oddities add to our perplexity, for a machine produces no such deviations; a mind would have chosen them with some intention; chance would have equalized the possibilities. Neither machine, nor intention, nor chance. … All our methods have been rejected. Machine and chance, these are the two methods of our physics; as for intention, it can intervene only if man himself is involved, explicitly or in disguise.
But the making of the shell is lived, not calculated: nothing could be more contrary to our organized action preceded by an aim and operating as a cause.
My most recent previous post from Valéry’s book is here.
-Julie