The passings

Self's less than a soul, I'm convinced of this.  But it's at least a linguistic construct, and maybe more like a manuscript, an inscription on materiality capable of some degree of replication, certainly of persistence beyond its first instantiation.

So what do we lose of other selves when our own efforts to inscribe them within our worlds are subverted by death?  Contingency, the texture of a world giving itself to us rather than being clarified as an effort of imagination.  That texture is more than comforting; it is fundamentally enabling, like a limb.  The deaths of those close to us are like the losses of limbs; their continuing felt presences are phantom limbs.

Not reading Proust

I haven't been reading Proust.  I got bogged down in it.  And now I'm five years older than I was -- more suited to reading Proust again, or less?  My hair's definitely all silvery now, powdered with the dust Marcel noted in his old friends and acquaintances, as I remember that concluding denouement.  I've toyed with going to my fortieth high school reunion, which impends, but there are no Charluses or Gilbertes awaiting me there and anyway, we're going to the Lair of the Bear that week.  Question to the gallery: is it necessary to close these circuits, necessary for all of us to do so, or is the fact that a few of you have completed the journey, Marcel included, sufficient?