Times of day

T

cast your mind back, but what cast of mind? To lose a sense of continuity, a past, an imagined future, to live only in the moment is not to live at all, in the human sense of the word.

I'll come back to this later since it's not easy. Stitch together with Agamben (VPs), Foucault( society must be defended), Gai Eaton, and Primo Levi.

Re-reading the latter after 20 years, and still it mystifies you but, you think, in a different way. What you pick up now, as a middle age man, is, perhaps, something altogether different. Not the horror of what Primo went through, not the calmness of his prose but the profound sadness that is associated with the other people mentioned in the book.

There is no knowledge here, no understanding, just the stark and unsettling presence of the permanently unfathomable in the constitution of reality. Not a young person's book by any stretch of the imagination and you have to ask yourself why you're drawn to it. The wrong question, perhaps. Focus.

There are striking passages that as a younger man you failed to register, or if you did then only in a superficial way since the deep impression was of a few grey and bleak images and not the memory of individual sentences.

The sense of sleeping on a road, on a bridge, a profound sense of vulnerability and exposure. Human beings, like all animals, need their "shells".

What moves you now (or, more accurately, what holds you still while at the same time setting into train a series of reflections) is not the plight of the author himself. Instead it is the sketches- and what else could they be under the circumstances- of the last acts, words, the recording of gestures that have been passed down the generations, as are the unique ways of speaking, laughing, smiling, of being in the world, that is. The face we glimpse, the broken sentence, half understood, all witnessed as if through a door that is about to close for ever. It's as if someone's whole life is to be encapsulated in, or traced from, that last hour of the day, before the shadows disappear under the dark evening. And there is something trul horrific in the thought that the whole of someone's personal history that led up to that hour is of nothing, erased, a blank space. A way of praying, questioning, vanishes. Continuity is broken up- and that is a feature of Hell since we are creatures who instinctively seek to unify, for who the serial moments of our lives only make sense against a background picture, a narrative.

A whole world, a language, an array of perspectives are, in fact, lost.

A few quotes...but don't look for meaning; not sure if there is any.

Fressen..the way of eating like animals ( on our feet) and certainly not Essen, the human way of eating, seated in front of the table, religiously' .... ..