With what goals do we engage in introspection? There’s always the grand plenitude to come, the promised comedy when everything comes out, but this is just another labyrinthine day in the life, etc., with fence fibers half buried in rain.
Her past is only a receding dim version of the woman who repeatedly steps slightly away from the life she has led, leaving dull fragments of it behind.
In the (loose and close) grip of ambivalence, one is both deep inside the zone of choice and on the fringes of the conditions and circumstances that demand one.
One can’t be a scholar of the future, one can’t learn from it, one can’t even learn about it.
To establish the character and value of something; we negotiate with the future, we barter with what we think we see ahead, what we expect to come.
. We traffic in what we hope for, what we fear, what we can’t finish by ourselves.
You think it’s a man in the distance coming along the country road, but as Husserl remarks, “it might be a tree moving in the wind, which in the gloom of the late afternoon at the edge of the field resembles a man in motion.” We define things by their peripheries, their proximities, the things around them to which they are bound but from which they differ. Trust has little to do with it; we cast out tendrils of interpretation as if with a paranoiac’s perspicacity and lucidity. “You utter fools, you senseless people,” says the Sophocles’s Old Slave in Electra, “do you take no heed any longer for your lives, or have you no inborn sense, that you fail to see that you are not merely close to but are in the midst of the greatest dangers?”
Five city pigeons fly into the air, driven from their perch under the eaves of a gray house by a homeowner bombarding them with tennis balls. A disheveled man goes by pulling a wagon and shouting curses to the curb and then to the corner store. Brotherfuck mothermouth turd-on-a-rock-in-your-face, do you hear me, do you hear me? Definitely—one should nurture one’s private sensibility (one’s “inner life”). One should deploy it in social spaces, pitch in, speak up, participate in “public life.” You can belong where you are for a moment. When everything gets loud enough—which is to say when sounds coalesce into a din—everything achieves synchrony, orchestration, and synonymy.
Characters are necessary to human microhistories, but those histories are of what has happened and is happening and not revelations of intelligent inevitability nor milestones along a road to progress.
Of course one can imagine death as rapacious, greedy, an impatient predator, a scavenger charged with clean-up, or, then again, as a supreme and theatrical deity, over inked or underground. Well, as a skeptic once put it, it’s wisest to follow the principle of the one no more than the other, which is as applicable to interpretations of allegory as to personifications of death.
The thought—a proposition, or perhaps a phantasm drawn from an impression—serves a sentence. There isn’t all that much distance between the prospect of death and the concept of beauty. A ridge, a sunset, a blossoming redbud—all are beautiful and, in their beauty, they assert their distance from us, but even today’s unvarying dull sky maintains distance, as if to make beauty itself inaccessible.
