Road rash

He did not remember how well he knew the place until his feet adopted a familiar tread, an almost youthful gait that he took a moment to recognise; along this particular stretch of road his feet forgot that they were clad in sturdy business shoes and not the worn, tatty sneakers that had long since disappeared, but which his feet remembered fondly in feel and form and fit. It was that junction again, with its streaking headlights and streaming exhaust hurtling in perpetual counterflow, the growling of intentions poised in cross-purposes across a ten-metre square of intersection that buzzed with tension and expectation. He had long memorised these details, but as the last synapses of recollection congealed in his mind, something else washed up from the cluttered sea of his memory — and what coagulated around these minutiae was not a hollow, echoing continental despair, but merely a terrible and utterly impervious anguish that had hardened and ossified like a scab around a bloody eye. He saw once again what the place had really meant to him, what the rules of the little red man who governed this crossing of paths made possible: it was the pocket of time that the junction created, a bubble of opportunity given an impeccable alias but which never was long enough for him to muster the courage to exploit, not even with a fleeting wave or a tentative greeting, before the green man burst into brilliance to wave time on its way, and the traffic exploded into motion and barrelled past him with the full bellow and bluster and violence of life.

"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"

"If someone believes that he has flown from America to England in the last few days, then, I believe, he cannot be making a mistake.

And just the same if someone says that he is at this moment sitting at a table and writing. But even if in such cases I can’t be mistaken, isn’t it possible that I am drugged?”

If I am and if the drug has taken away my consciousness, then I am not now really talking and thinking. I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming.

Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining", while it was in fact raining.

Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain."

- Wittgenstein, MS177

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." Tractatus, 6.431

Passing time

Something that I sense very acutely nowadays is the passage of time, the unbearable subterranean creep of the hour or the desperation of seconds flinging themselves off a ticking watch. There's something about being ill that tinges everything with a hint of unreality, like the ripple of noumena hidden beneath the surfaces of objects; things pass in slow motion through the fog of fever, and the structure of each hour melts into the slide of seconds across the glowing tangent of twilight through my window.

When we read it is so difficult to tell what is right and what is wrong, but sometimes when we hit upon words that seem to explain an enduring truth, perhaps time itself slows and stops at the borders of these pages.