The Seba library treats Marble in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including Bulkeley, Kelly, A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, Bosnak, Robert).
Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words?—‘In This House, on July 24th, 1895, the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud.’
This passage treats marble as the material of permanent commemoration, through which Freud’s founding psychoanalytic dream is literally inscribed into cultural memory, with the eventual installation of the plaque fulfilling his prophetic wish.
, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 2017thesis
things which a little earlier were black in colour can suddenly take on the whiteness of marble, as the sea, when its surface has been churned up by great winds, is turned into waves whose whiteness is like that of gleaming marble.
In the atomist argument against fixed colour-seeds, marble’s gleaming whiteness serves as the paradigmatic instance of transformation in appearance, demonstrating that colour is not intrinsic to primary particles but emerges from their rearrangement.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis
A dreamer, taking a class in Jung’s active imagination, dreams that she is in a round marble hall. A wide marble winding staircase leads down.
Bosnak deploys the marble hall and staircase as the archetypal threshold-space of embodied imagination, distinguishing free active imagination from restrained imaginal work by tracing how the dreamer’s descent through this material architecture is handled.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
μαρμαίρω [v.] ‘to flash, sparkle, gleam’ (Il., late also prose) … Besides μαρμαρωής ‘gleaming, flashing, sparkling’ (Il.) with μαρμαρίζω = μαρμαίρω
Beekes’s etymological analysis traces the Pre-Greek verbal root marmaírō — ‘to flash, sparkle, gleam’ — from which the marble word-family derives, grounding the term’s depth-psychological resonance of luminosity in its earliest linguistic stratum.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
the upshot of this parenthesis on the dissolving of earth, water, and air, in so far as it concerns the class of substances under consideration (such as glass and wax), which are compounds of earth and water
In the course of analysing the dissolution of elemental compounds, Plato’s Timaeus commentary implicitly situates marble-like hard solids within a cosmological chemistry of earth and water, tangentially relevant to marble’s symbolic hardness and resistance to dissolution.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside