“ ‘The most astonishing discovery of recent times—at any rate the one that has taught me the most—is the discovery of the photogenic apparatus of deep-sea creatures.’
    ‘Oh, tell us about it!’ cried Lilian, letting her cigarette go out and her ice melt on the plate.
    ‘You know, no doubt, that the light of day does not reach very far down in to the sea. Its depths are dark . . . huge gulfs, which for a long time were thought to be uninhabited; then people began dragging them, and quantities of strange animals were brought up from those infernal regions—animals that were blind, it was thought. What use would the sense of sight be in the dark? Evidently they had no eyes; they wouldn’t, they couldn’t have eyes. Nevertheless, on examination it was found to people’s amazement that some of them had eyes; that they almost all had eyes, and sometimes antennae of extraordinary sensibility into the bargain. Still people doubted and wondered: why eyes with no means of seeing? Eyes that are sensitive—but sensitive to what? . . . And at last it was discovered that each of these animals which people at first insisted were creatures of darkness, gives forth and projects before an around it its own light. Each of them shines, illuminates, irradiates. When they were brought up from the depths at night and turned out on to the ship’s deck, the darkness blazed. Moving, many-coloured fires, glowing, vibrating, changing—revolving beacon-lamps—sparkling of stars and jewels—a spectacle, say those who saw it, of unparalleled splendour.’
    Vincent stopped. No one spoke for a long time.”

—André Gide, The Counterfeiters, translated by Dorothy Bussy, 1927.