How can we speak, when speech is worn down in our mouths? What words are ours, we who lack even an experience of ourselves? Besides, we have nothing to say - what is there to say, for us? - of what can we speak when we live outside time, and even our pasts do not sink into history?
Nothing has happened to us - or if it has happened, it is already forgotten. Or is it that everything has happened, that we've exhausted time, and live on in some afterworld? Is this paradise? Is it hell? But we are being neither exalted nor punished, and if the Messiah appeared amongst our number, we would not know him.
For in truth, we do not know that we are here, or that each of us is the one he is, or the one she is. We are all the same; our faces do not matter. Each the same, the one then the other, we form no group, no society. There may be many of us, or few: we do not know. There are no friendships - associations, perhaps, and even a kind of dim recognition (you were beside me earlier; I remember your voice - but not what you said), but nothing else. There are no relationships between us, no kith, no kin: we have worn them out, as we have worn out everything.
Still, we are not alone. We can say, 'we': this is a consolation. There is that: our sense of collectivity. The third person plural: we have that; it is ours: but is it ours? It is less firm than the first person, which we never use. Who would dare speak in their own name? To speak of me is only to speak of you; we are all in each other's places, and who we are, singly, individually, does not matter. I am you - and you: aren't you also where I am? Who of us has ever minded being no one in particular?
We are not sad. We are placid, simple; ours is a sweet dullness; I think we are smiling, I think we always smile. And sometimes we speak, just to try out speech, just to hear our voices. We could say anything - everything; there's everything to be said, but without history, without a past - without even a present, let alone a future, there is nothing to relate.
Nothing has happened to us - that, or everything; it does not matter. Nothing - everything: is it that we live where nothing becomes everything, and the other way round. Nothing - everything: that is our threshold, the turning point of the world. We do not rest, but nor are still. We are not even silent, though our murmuring is hardly a sound, and rarely forms itself into a word.
Days pass, we know that. And nights. The passing of the day, the passing of night: soon forgotten. But what is there to remember? Who knows how many days, how many nights there have been? There are no chroniclers amongst us. No prophets. We do not detain time, but let it turn in place.
Time! We only know the incessant, the interminable. What need have we for this instant, or for that? In truth, there is only the return - we live for it - by which what fails to happen happens again. Or is it that we fail it, the event, by being too unprepared, too indifferent? Perhaps it is tired of waiting for us to act, or is our tiredness, our placidity, a sign of its approach?
There are no philosophers amongst us; we do not think, unless thinking is what happens in that same return, which breaks over us each time like the first day. Sweet evasion: is there a kind of thinking that does not ask for a thinker? An evasive thought that is evasion in each of us, our failure to be ourselves? We have always failed; we do not mind. But what would it mean to succeed?
Everything has happened - no doubt. Nothing has happened - without doubt. History has ended, having never begun. And what is time but its disjunctive return, the tearing of each instant from itself, that substitutes for the event the incessance of what does not happen. Do we live? I would say we are alive, but I would also say we are unable to be, just as we are unable not to be. We have no part in duration; time is what we do not endure. Or it is that same non-endurance; it is the unlivable, it is what life becomes when it is absolutely indifferent to itself.
Are we alive? We are not here, I would like to insist on that. Not here - or each of us lives in another's place. I speak for all of us, and for none of us. No one is speaking in each of us and for all of us. No one speaks; everything that is said is superfluous. Speak to us, and you will here superfluity eroding every word we say.
That is why we smile. We can do nothing; we do not suffer, none of us is sad; we have no words of our own. Were we born too early or too late? I do not know if we are old or young. Did we resign ourselves, long ago, to the incessant, or were we born of that same incessance, as though we were its way of knowing itself? I am not sure, and besides, there is no one here to know.
Unless that 'no one' is the locus of another knowledge, and incessance knows itself in our place as each is substituted for another. Still, nothing is kept; knowledge does not settle into itself. Sometimes I think we stand at the beginning of everything, sometimes, at the end. How is it that everything seems possible and impossible, both at once?
We never were: I would like to say that. And we never will be. And in this divided instant, the return of the disjunction of time: we are not here, either. We do not suffer from time; in truth, we do not occupy it, and our vacancy is our liberation. But for what are we free? There is nothing we want; desire is alien to us, or it belongs to no one.
Freedom: sometimes I imagine it as a wind that tousles our hair. But does it know that freedom, for us, is only the wind that bows the heads of corn: it happens, yes, but it does not concern us. Freedom: we can move, there are degrees of movement; each of us, from time to time, stands, or moves about, or lies down: we are not automatons. But it matters not to us, that standing up, that moving about. There is no need for rest where there is no need for movement. Do we live at the end or at the beginning?
But I have said nothing at all. Or by writing, I have tried to tie the incessant to a story. We are outside all stories as we live untouched by time. What has happened? What has ever happened? Our chance is that words sink back into the page, saying nothing. Or that words, lightening themselves, form and disperse like great clouds.
No one suffers here. Time is kind to us. Our lives are sweet and placid. We are calm and languid. There are no words invented that could let us speak. We cannot be apprehended by thought. There is thinking - we know that (but what do we know?). We are with you when the wind from the impossible tousles your hair. With you - but that is not the expression. Unless I could write, with you and without you, or speak of what is outside, always outside, even as it is also our separate bodies.
Persistence without point. Sweet monotony. We interest no one, not even ourselves. We have withdrawn, and first of all from ourselves. Are we asleep? Awake? I do not know if we dream. We are fragments - but of what? From what have we been broken?