irregularities

Did not Goethe speak of those "objects that favor man"? If we would hear an object invite us to enjoy life, if we would hear this excellent advice to be happy in the world of things, in the "order of things," let us reread the passage in which Brosse is meditating on that loveliest of all fruits -- the peach.

It is round. Objects of happiness are always round. Happiness rounds out everything it enters. But the peach's roundness is of course a full, substantial, inner roundness. This is no mere embodiment of some Platonic form in a geometry of ideas; the ball formed by the peach will never be a sphere. Its perfection stems from its irregularities. "The peach is irregular, like flesh and, like flesh, resistant to all geometrical synthesis."

-- Gaston Bachelard, in the preface to L'ordre des choses by Jacques Brosse
Translated by J.A. Underwood