Edmond Jabes:
Three times was God exiled: in the Name, in the bursting open of the Name, and in the effacing of this bursting open. (The Book of Questions)
Augustine, Confessions X:
I run through all these things, I fly here and there in my mind, and penetrate their workings as far as I can. But I never reach the end” (*Conf *10.17.26).
From Beckett, The Expelled:
There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind. And when I say that the figure has gone from my mind, I mean that none of the three figures is with me anymore, in my mind. It is true that if I were to find, in my mind, where it is certainly to be found, one of these figures, I would find it and it alone, without being able to deduce from it the other two. And even were I to recover two, I would not know the third. No, I would have to find all three, in my mind, in order to know all three. Memories are killing
Again, from Augustine’s Confessions:
But what when the memory itself loses anything, as falls out
when we forget and seek that we may recollect? Where
in the end do we search, but in the memory itself?
And there, if one thing be perchance offered instead of
another, we reject it, until what we seek meets us;
and when it does, we say, "This is it"; which we should
not unless we recognized it, nor recognize it unless
we remembered it. Certainly then we had forgotten it.
Or, had not the whole escaped us, but by the part
whereof we had hold, was the lost part sought for;
in that the memory felt that it did not carry on
together all which it was wont, and maimed, as it
were, by the curtailment of its ancient habit,
demanded the restoration of what it missed?
For we have not as yet utterly forgotten that
which we remember ourselves to have forgotten. What
then we have utterly forgotten, though lost, we cannot
even seek after. How then do I seek a happy life, seeing
I have it not, until I can say, where I ought to say it,
"It is enough"? How do I seek it? By remembrance, as
though I had forgotten it, remembering that I had
forgotten it? Or, desiring to learn it as a thing
unknown, either never having known, or so forgotten it,
as not even to remember that I had forgotten it?
From The Calmative:
So I’ll tell myself a story, I’ll try and tell myself
another story, to try and calm myself, and it’s there
I fell I’ll be old, old, even older than the day I fell,
calling for help, and it came.
From The Expelled:
My shadow, one of my shadows, flew before me, dwindled, slid under
my feet, trailed behind me the way shadows will. This degree of opacity
appeared to me conclusive.
Descartes, Meditations II
But how could I deny that I possess these hands and this body, and escape being classed with persons in a state of insanity, whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapors as to cause them to assert that they are monarchs when they are in the greatest poverty; or clothed [in gold] and purple when destitute of any covering; or that their head is made of clay, their body of glass, or that they are gourds? We say, for example, that we see [things as they are.] There is the analogous instance of human beings passing on in the street below, as observed from a window. In this case I do not fail to say that I see the men themselves; and yet what do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs?
From The Calmative:
To say that there was no one abroad, no, I would not go that far, for I remarked a number of shapes, male and female, strange shapes but not more so than usual.
From The Expelled
I found myself at the foot of a staircase which I began to climb, mindless of my heart, like one hotly pursued by a homicidal maniac…
But soon I was descending a wide street, vaguely familiar…
“The individual himself is revealed to be a historical category, both the outcome of the capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it, something transient . . . . Endgame [Beckett] assumes that the individual’s claim to autonomy and being has lost its credibility.”
–Adorno, 1961
Marjorie Perloff, “In Love With Hiding”: Samuel Beckett’s War:
The step-counting ritual that opens “The Expelled” is the sort of absurd mental exercise one engages in when trying to keep oneself going in a moment of unbearable stress. The narrator admits that “After all, it is not the number of steps that matters.” (He has been considering whether to count the sidewalk as the first step which would give him n + 1, or to count the top of the steps as well, which makes n + 2.) “The important thing to remember is that there were not many, and that I have remembered.”
Wittgenstein, Letters 1949:
It’s like this: In the city, streets are nicely laid out. And you drive on the right and you have traffic lights, etc. There are rules. When you leave the city, there are still roads, but no traffic lights. And when you get far off there are no roads, no lights, no rules, nothing to guide you. (Culture and Value)
Wittgenstein:
To imagine is to imagine a form of life (Philosophical Investigations)