born the yes and the no) (but if you linger a bit longer you end up “knowing” that the instant is an instant and then it is mutely shredded) (you have to start over) (winding, rewinding, winding powers) (without letting certain things of the world get too close) (above all what’s past is past and is exactly just of that small instant we’re talking about and also that one, and also that one, and also that one) (but every one for itself) — and before you know it without a single word she’d already achieved. Anyway her whole being was propped up by a few words. But used with such meaning, with such a kind of blind and strange nature that, when she used them out loud or in thought or when she heard them, she didn’t tremble, didn’t recognize, didn’t realize; in her busy and detailed intimacy she was living without memory. Before falling asleep, concentrated and magical, she would say farewell to things in a last instant of lightly illuminated consciousness. She knew that in the half-light “her things” were better living their own essence. “Her things” — she was thinking without words, sly inside her own darkness — “her things” like “her animals.” She would feel profoundly that she was surrounded by things living and dead and that the dead ones had been alive — she was feeling them with careful eyes. Slowly she’d go sub-understanding, living with caution and consideration; without knowing she was admitting her desire to see in the extinguished and dusty light bulb more than a light bulb. She didn’t know that she was thinking that if she saw just the light bulb she’d be on the wrong side of it and wouldn’t grasp its reality — mysteriously if she went beyond things she would grasp her center. Though she thought “her things” as if saying “her animals,” feeling that their effort wasn’t in having a human nucleus but in staying on a pure extra-human plane. She was barely understanding them and her life was of reserve, enchantment and relative happiness; she’d sometimes feel curled up into herself — wasn’t most of her existence thing? that was the feeling; most of her constellation was living with its own unknown force, following an imponderable path. And in truth if there were any possibility of her not being intimately quiet, by virtue of that inexpressible impression she would be. Seated at the table, looking at her fingers alone in the world, she was thinking confusedly with a precision without words that was like light and delicate movements, like a buzzing of thought: thoughts about things exist in things themselves without attaching to whoever observes them; thoughts about things come out of them as perfume frees itself from the flower, even if nobody smells it, even if nobody even knows that that flower exists . . .; the thought of the thing exists as much as the thing itself, not in words of explanation but as another order of facts; quick facts, subtle, visible exactly through some sense, as only the sense of smell perceives the flower’s perfume — she was resounding. The quality of her thought was merely a circular movement. She was noticing a scratch on her finger and attentive to life forgetting everything as through slumber is forgotten whatever was thought an instant before sleep. Like someone whose body needed salt as an essential substance and then ate it with thirsty pleasure — she’d always felt a simple and avid pleasure in making an effort and saying to herself clearly: I see a chair, a box of powder, an open pair of scissors, a black drawer . . . The great still-life in which she was living. Nevertheless she felt she was mixing things up, arranging them at her pleasure and bothering them. Ah, if I had time, just a little time, she seemed to be saying to herself with her head bent and confused. Anyway she’d noticed: when she’d open her eyes wide she’d see nothing. Except the words, thoughts made of words. When she’d stare with gaping eyes at her seated grandmother she’d lose the notion of the grandmother and see nothing, not even a little old lady. The truth was so fast. You had to squint. It was occurring to her in strange and swift seconds of vision that her communication with the world, that secret atmosphere that she was cultivating around herself like a darkness, was her final existence — beyond that border she herself was silent like a thing. And it was that final interior life that was carrying forth without lacuna the thread of her most elf-like existence in childhood. The rest would stretch out horribly new, had created itself as if out of itself — that body of hers now and its habits. And that religion was so little rich and potent that it didn’t have ritual — its greatest gesture would exhaust itself in a quick and unnoticed glance, full of “I know, I know,” of a promise of fidelity and of mutual support in a closed and almost evil union; united and simple, no movement would symbolize it, it was the accepted mystery. Really however she didn’t know what was happening to her and her only way of knowing it was living it.
Only thus could she connect herself to the past of which she lacked the memory. Stripped of memory she was living her life simply without ecstasy; yet a strange attention would sometimes overtake her, vaguely she was trying to think how she had emerged from childhood toward the ground, she was trying to orient herself to no avail; in an odd moment it would seem to her that she’d lived the same instant in another age, in another color and in another sound — her rhythm would suddenly break off, she would halt and with a calm made of shock and caution fumble in her interior, try to discover. As soon however as she became aware
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