A true space

“This is a book written in good faith, reader.

It warns you from the outset that I have proposed to myself no end other than a domestic and private one: I have had no consideration for your service, nor for my own glory. My powers are not capable of such a design. I have dedicated it to the particular convenience of my relatives and friends, so that, having lost me (which they are likely to do soon), they may find in it some traces of my character and temper, and by this means nourish a more complete and vivid knowledge of me. Had my aim been to seek the favor of the world, I would have adorned myself better and presented myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, and ordinary manner, without strain or artifice: for it is myself that I portray. My faults will be read here to the quick, and my naive form, as far as public reverence has allowed me. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.

Farewell.”

Michel de Montaigne, Essays

Between two letters, let us concern ourselves with Igniatius’s characters. Don Carotte has become Anatole. Sang Chaud has become Don Carotte (in his image). They are two… yet like three… and they speak among themselves about Igniatius and Lucian, of whose existence they are curiously aware, without Igniatius and Lucian suspecting it. The question Sang Chaud, now Don Carotte, asks is how Anatole knows of the existence of Igniatius and Lucian. Anatole will attempt to explain it.

– We are… well, we were… and still are… the creatures of Igniatius, and he sees a psychoanalyst named Lucian.

Anatole

– It appears to me… at the same time that… time itself is given to me only on that condition. When my attention disperses, slipping from one thought to another, preoccupied with what was or what might be, the present shrinks to a thin surface that I pass over without feeling it. The hours go by, leaving behind a sense of emptiness, similar to that produced by certain dreams forgotten too quickly. But sometimes a detail almost insignificant is enough—the rustle of a fabric, a scent recognizable among all others, the particular way a sentence comes to an end—for my attention to gather itself, and at once time ceases to escape: it thickens, expands, becomes a substance in which I can remain, as if the instant, until then fleeting, finally consented to receive me.
I then notice, with an unease I cannot entirely dispel, that this attention I believe to be mine escapes me more often than I admit. I catch myself listening without hearing, looking without seeing, responding even before having welcomed the other’s words, and I understand that my inattention is not always innocent. It is sometimes a way of protecting myself, sometimes a discreet refusal to let myself be affected. To be attentive to someone, I feel, is not only to grant them time; it is to acknowledge an existence that can oblige me… or transform me—and perhaps that is what I fear.