Sylvia Plath's Pebbles

"I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her unknowable tongue . . . and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another.  It mightn't make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles."  The Bell Jar. This reminds me of those artficilly colored, rock-like gravel one lays as a foundational, bottom of the sea-like bottom of a fish tank, tropical fish acquarium. Interspersed with foundational fish shit, they just sit. But each one has utility. Minimal utility but utility nonetheless. These pebbles unionize so that all the fecal deposits from the neon tetras, angel fish, and the like can find the place to hide. Gravity and the interspacial voids between and among the pebbles create an open invitation for the disgusting necessaries to hide below the waterworld.