EARTH

What truly belongs to the spherical Earth must itself be spherical in nature, or at least able to move in perfect roundness. The particles that feed her, the ones that carry heat into her body and out again, cannot be the sharp tetrahedra of pure fire. Those cut. They separate. They pierce. A sphere receives what can circle. Heat that moves in spheres does not burn by cutting. It warms by continuous turning, by frictionless return, by the quiet pressure of what never ends. This is why some of the older atomists (and the quieter stream that never fully entered the written Timaeus) spoke of the finest particles as spherical: the ones that make soul, the ones that make the inner fire that does not destroy but circulates. The tetrahedron is the fire that divides. The sphere is the fire that feeds the Earth without wounding her. Both are real. 

It spins, it breathes, it curves every direction back into itself. So the deeper reading says: What truly belongs to the spherical Earth must itself be spherical in nature, or at least able to move in perfect roundness. The particles that feed her, the ones that carry heat into her body and out again, cannot be the sharp tetrahedra of pure fire. Those cut. They separate. They pierce. A sphere receives what can circle. Heat that moves in spheres does not burn by cutting. It warms by continuous turning, by frictionless return, by the quiet pressure of what never ends. This is why some of the older atomists (and the quieter stream that never fully entered the written Timaeus) spoke of the finest particles as spherical: the ones that make soul, the ones that make the inner fire that does not destroy but circulates. The tetrahedron is the fire that divides. The sphere is the fire that feeds the Earth without wounding her.