The past never ceases to have been.
It never ceases to become past.
It never ceases to become past.
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There was something almost comical in this constraint, and I think I might have laughed at myself had I not soon felt how thoroughly the joke was turning against the person I had been until then: I, who knew so well how to listen for shifts in other people’s words, to wait for a sentence to return in another form, to perceive in a hesitation, a repetition, a silence, a movement of which the person facing me was sometimes not yet aware, and who had perhaps ended by believing, without ever admitting it to myself, that understanding such a shift gave me some advantage over it; for now my body was doing before me what my intelligence could only afterwards manage to name, and each time I thought I had understood the direction of the roll, my legs had already been forced to improvise their response, so that I found myself in the reverse of the situation familiar to me: no longer the one who dances with words while watching others search for their balance, but the one whose body, forced to speak before thought had found its sentence, was surrendered to a syntax older than his own.
I did not think of Igniatius then, or, if his name passed somewhere through me, it did not do so in a form clear enough for me to arrest it, and yet I understand now that he was perhaps already there, not as a memory against which I might deliberately have compared my situation, but in that strange necessity in which I found myself of beginning with gesture, with posture, with that movement of the body which precedes the word and to which the word, when it finally arrives, often does no more than belatedly lend the appearance of an origin; for I had set out precisely to discover what was true of his images, where they came from, whose hand had drawn them, and now, before I had even set foot on the island, I found myself compelled to experience, in a form admittedly trivial beside what his own story might have been, what it means to speak before words, to answer with a body one no longer entirely commands, to allow a gesture to occur before being able to say what it means.
Yet this thought had no time to become a thought, for the sea continued its work with an indifference that made its movements more impressive still than if they had been directed against us; it had nothing to teach me, it was unaware even of my existence, knew neither Félix nor Igniatius nor the drawings, and if some initiation were to emerge from what was to follow, it would have been absurd to attribute any intention to it, since it would have raised the same masses of water had I never lived at all; and it was precisely this total absence of design that was beginning to unsettle another of my habits, the one that makes us believe that whatever happens to us must necessarily bear some relation to us whose meaning we need only discover.
The wave I saw whitening beside the ship was no longer, for me, an isolated thing, for I sensed confusedly that it was merely the visible manifestation of a movement begun elsewhere, transmitted from one mass to another, perhaps crossed by other swells coming from a different direction, deflected by the depths, soon to be reflected by the underwater walls of lands I could not yet see; the water rose beneath the hull, withdrew, encountered its own returning movement, and the liner, which until then had seemed to me enormous enough to be almost independent of everything around it, suddenly revealed its true smallness, not by comparison with some particular wave that might have risen higher than itself, but because it was entirely contained within a system of movements none of which had its centre on board.
I no longer knew exactly what it meant to move forward, since the bow was rising while the deck tilted, since we seemed to be turning even as the horizon, whenever it appeared for an instant between the darkness and the spray, was itself moving in the opposite direction, and since the only point from which I might have decided which of these movements was real lay precisely within me—that is, in the body least capable, at that moment, of remaining still; behind, ahead, above, below still retained their meaning in language, but were gradually losing their obviousness in experience, and I discovered, with growing unease, that the orientation we take to be a property of the world may depend, to a very large extent, upon the provisional stillness of the place from which we look at it.
I did not think of Igniatius then, or, if his name passed somewhere through me, it did not do so in a form clear enough for me to arrest it, and yet I understand now that he was perhaps already there, not as a memory against which I might deliberately have compared my situation, but in that strange necessity in which I found myself of beginning with gesture, with posture, with that movement of the body which precedes the word and to which the word, when it finally arrives, often does no more than belatedly lend the appearance of an origin; for I had set out precisely to discover what was true of his images, where they came from, whose hand had drawn them, and now, before I had even set foot on the island, I found myself compelled to experience, in a form admittedly trivial beside what his own story might have been, what it means to speak before words, to answer with a body one no longer entirely commands, to allow a gesture to occur before being able to say what it means.
Yet this thought had no time to become a thought, for the sea continued its work with an indifference that made its movements more impressive still than if they had been directed against us; it had nothing to teach me, it was unaware even of my existence, knew neither Félix nor Igniatius nor the drawings, and if some initiation were to emerge from what was to follow, it would have been absurd to attribute any intention to it, since it would have raised the same masses of water had I never lived at all; and it was precisely this total absence of design that was beginning to unsettle another of my habits, the one that makes us believe that whatever happens to us must necessarily bear some relation to us whose meaning we need only discover.
The wave I saw whitening beside the ship was no longer, for me, an isolated thing, for I sensed confusedly that it was merely the visible manifestation of a movement begun elsewhere, transmitted from one mass to another, perhaps crossed by other swells coming from a different direction, deflected by the depths, soon to be reflected by the underwater walls of lands I could not yet see; the water rose beneath the hull, withdrew, encountered its own returning movement, and the liner, which until then had seemed to me enormous enough to be almost independent of everything around it, suddenly revealed its true smallness, not by comparison with some particular wave that might have risen higher than itself, but because it was entirely contained within a system of movements none of which had its centre on board.
I no longer knew exactly what it meant to move forward, since the bow was rising while the deck tilted, since we seemed to be turning even as the horizon, whenever it appeared for an instant between the darkness and the spray, was itself moving in the opposite direction, and since the only point from which I might have decided which of these movements was real lay precisely within me—that is, in the body least capable, at that moment, of remaining still; behind, ahead, above, below still retained their meaning in language, but were gradually losing their obviousness in experience, and I discovered, with growing unease, that the orientation we take to be a property of the world may depend, to a very large extent, upon the provisional stillness of the place from which we look at it.
