I did indeed receive your letter urging me to send you the promised text for your special issue on love. But I did warn you that I could tell you only what I think. It was you who questioned me, it is to you that I respond. For I have had, for a long time, nothing more to say about love. It’s a feeling that I believed I had and understood, at a time when I was developing false ideas about life, for in truth I never found any love in it, only in me:
[The following is text of a talk I gave early this fall at the Philadelphia conference on Psychedemia (C.S.)]
The point is that a thought — any thought — retards time: The infinitely rapid rush of transition — the white susurrus of the immediate movement from one instant to its successor. To be possessed of a thought — it is as if there were a station in time at which one could have a recess from its passage. One stops to consider. One places before oneself that which a thought contains in order to elaborate, reflect, develop, associate . . . while holding the position of the original thought. Time flies on, but the thought remains... Sort of.
Poems and poetics