“When I consider the short duration of my life, absorbed into the eternity that precedes and follows it, the small space that I occupy, and even that I see, swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces I do not know and that do not know me, I am frightened and astonished to find myself here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has placed me here? By whose order and guidance have this place and this time been assigned to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis. What is a man in the infinite?”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
“My limits are now well delimited…”
Excerpt from the first notebook of the Moon Child
— The sentence is beautiful, but it already contains a small twist worth lingering over if we are to understand it…
— What are you referring to?
— Thank you for allowing me to go, even slightly, beyond… What I stumble over is this verb to delimit, which seems to oppose the verb to limit…
— You are touching on a grammatical illusion that in fact opens onto a conceptual abyss…
The prefix “de-” in French often carries a value of removal, negation, even inversion, as in to undo or to untie. One might therefore spontaneously think that “to delimit” is the opposite of “to limit,” as if delimiting meant removing a limit, dissolving it.
— And then?
— Yet something much more subtle is happening here. “To limit,” in its usual sense, means to restrict, to contain, to prevent expansion. It is an operation acting on a movement already underway. One limits a growth, an excess, a spread. There is an idea here of restraint.
“To delimit,” on the other hand, traces and removes nothing. It draws and brings forth a form by marking its contours. To delimit is to make something exist as distinct.
— So the “de-” does not function here as a negation!
— Exactly. It is like an operation of bringing to light. It does not undo the limit; it sets it.
One could say: limiting acts on a force, delimiting acts on a form. But this distinction, while illuminating, does not dissolve the tension. It deepens it.
For every delimitation already implies a limitation.
As soon as I trace a contour, I fix an inside and an outside. What is delimited is at the same time limited. The form I bring forth is also what I hold within a certain perimeter.
— That might seem to close the movement…
— As you say… it is as if everything were now fixed. And yet, what you add—“thank you for allowing me to go, even slightly, beyond”—shows exactly the opposite.
For a clearly delimited limit does not merely contain: it makes it possible to think a beyond. As long as the limit remains vague, there is no real “beyond.” There is only a mixture, a continuity without relief. Nothing is distinct enough to be crossed. But as soon as the limit becomes precise, something appears along with it…
— What, then?
— The possibility of its crossing. It is no accident that, in so many experiences—intellectual or bodily—we discover that it is by encountering a limit that we begin to glimpse what may exceed it. The limit then becomes a kind of sensitive surface. It is no longer only what stops, but what responds. It tells you: “up to here,” but this “up to here” is not a wall. It is a silent invitation. To go “slightly beyond,” as you say, is not an act of brutal rupture. It is not to destroy the limit.
— What would it be, then?
— It is to experience it through its different senses.
— When you say “its” different senses… to whom or to what are you referring?
— You already know… when we touch something or someone, we are at the same time touched ourselves… It is therefore the limit that touches the one who discovers it… and the limit that is brushed by the one who brushes against it… And in this brushing, something is transformed.
For crossing a limit, even in the slightest way, does not consist in abolishing it. The limit shifts, reconfigures itself, redraws itself. It continues to play its role, but otherwise.
— One might say that the limit is never there to be definitively surpassed, but to be continually reenacted.
— It is less an obstacle than a place of experience.
— And perhaps what you are formulating, without saying it explicitly, touches on this: to delimit one’s limits is not to enclose oneself…
— What is it, then?
— It is to render perceptible the precise point where something can begin to transform.
There is in this “slightly” you use a rare accuracy.
— Thank you… you flatter me…
— For it is not in spectacular transgression that the limit reveals its nature…
— And where would that be?
— In those infinitesimal displacements where it ceases to be a fixed boundary and becomes a living threshold.
— A threshold that does not disappear when one crosses it… I suppose?
— …A living threshold… but one that discreetly accompanies each step beyond.
But the word hospes (guest/host) immediately troubles this simplicity. In Latin, it designates not only the one who is received, but also the one who receives. The guest is both visitor and host. He never occupies a fixed place. He is caught in a relation where roles are constantly reversed.
From that moment on, memory can no longer be thought of as a simple receptacle. It is not a stable place where something is deposited. It is itself engaged in this play of reception and passage. It receives, but it is also traversed. What it retains transforms it.
And the ambiguity can go further still. “Of a single day” does not refer only to the brevity of the stay. One may hear that the day itself becomes the guest. The day enters, illuminates, then disappears. It visits our existence without ever settling in it.
In this light, we are no longer only those who remember. We become the place where days pass. Memory is then what remains of these successive visits: not intact presences, but traces already in the process of fading.
Thus the formula says something at once very simple and very profound: what passes does not disappear without remainder, but what remains is never stable. It is a memory inhabited by passage itself. A memory that is not a possession, but a fragile hospitality granted to what only comes and goes.
