4.1 Everything has its time in the sun.
4.2 All lives are incomplete.
4.3 Memory may be a feast for some and an empty table for others. But for those who starve, the imagination can create the sounds and smells, if not the actual pleasure of digestion.
4.4 The infidelity of forgetting.
4.5 Observing in a Derridean vein that no man-made system contains the thing that it is intended and aspires to produce, can we draw any conclusion as yet concerning the sustained and systematic application of time and effort to the writing of billets d'amour?
4.6 The "to come" - so essential to support the human condition, and so inessential to all other forms of being. L'avenir.
4.7 Each individual life is doomed. The future and death are one and the same. Awareness of death is only possible with awareness of the future. The human condition, which is so inclined to avoidance and evasion and forgetfulness, cannot escape. It comes in time and with awareness of time.
4.8 Picture a man moving forward, walking, and he stops suddenly because he has come to the realization finally that death lies before him. Looking back then seems like the preferred direction, but he also knows the past is passed. In that little space, as it were, there is a species of melancholy (not to be confused with either depression or mere sentimentality) which broadens one's horizon.
4.9 How is it then, that time is said to "pass"? Does time itself move? If it does move and will not stop, then all things that I know must forever recede. At least, if we are to keep the analogy. A thing does not move without the passing of time, so perhaps the passing of time is not an analogy after all, but a necessity of this objective world that is perceptible to us because our bodies and our minds , too, have temporal existence. To "recall" or "recollect" by virtue of voluntary memory is to make a counterfeit by means of a token. It is in this sense that when our authors speak of their epiphanies they allude to the satisfaction of re-experience as a form of pleasure (or of suffering) vastly superior to, and of a different order from mere memories constructed by the mind from the traces of events left behind.
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Aphorisms & Reflections
Non-FictionA collection of aphorisms and other short writings on a range of metaphysical and aesthetic topics, with observations about the work of particular artists and writers.
