'I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding which is Jewish.'
---Bellow.
Second spaces, second chances, not for the first time.
The human condition: the time of the body (birth, growth, decline and death) and the time that is aware of this (consciousness). The time that is lived and that which is thought: the circle and the tangent...
There's a wonderful line in J Berger...about how the gold of pollen is older than the iron of the mountains; how it's always been there, and will be even when things are on the level.
There is no magic, perfect 'circle', only its reflection. We stand at its centre and imagine the circumference. Life, a constellation of events with their own inner working, their own pattern and not a continuous stream. There is duration and deepening, the background work, simple moments when everything is gathered and brought into focus (by what hand?).
Our lives, brief though they are, have moved away from their centre and discovered other, more provincial or limited ones. Gone off on a tangent...to lose oneself in a steady stream of aimlessness.
Tangential: hardly getting to the truth of it, vaguely or erratically related to the centre.
Tangential evidence. The witness who stays in the dark corner, waiting for her turn to speak.
'The tangent would be merely a line without the circle.'
~~~
Books of the year (2013)
1. Nescio, Amsterdam Stories
2. Walser, Institute Benjamenta
3. Gopnik, Winter
4. Cheever, The Journals
5. Barnes, Levels of Life
---Bellow.
Second spaces, second chances, not for the first time.
The human condition: the time of the body (birth, growth, decline and death) and the time that is aware of this (consciousness). The time that is lived and that which is thought: the circle and the tangent...
There's a wonderful line in J Berger...about how the gold of pollen is older than the iron of the mountains; how it's always been there, and will be even when things are on the level.
There is no magic, perfect 'circle', only its reflection. We stand at its centre and imagine the circumference. Life, a constellation of events with their own inner working, their own pattern and not a continuous stream. There is duration and deepening, the background work, simple moments when everything is gathered and brought into focus (by what hand?).
Our lives, brief though they are, have moved away from their centre and discovered other, more provincial or limited ones. Gone off on a tangent...to lose oneself in a steady stream of aimlessness.
Tangential: hardly getting to the truth of it, vaguely or erratically related to the centre.
Tangential evidence. The witness who stays in the dark corner, waiting for her turn to speak.
'The tangent would be merely a line without the circle.'
~~~
Books of the year (2013)
1. Nescio, Amsterdam Stories
2. Walser, Institute Benjamenta
3. Gopnik, Winter
4. Cheever, The Journals
5. Barnes, Levels of Life
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