The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life. This loneliness [is] deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else: deeper than my genius, deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep countermining of art.Henry James, letter to Morton Fullerton, 1900.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
A vessel in vain
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"Death and memory are identical: they are unique to each man, and men who think that because they have shared similar experiences with others they therefore share common memories fail to realise that everyone's memories are different, and that they are condemned to the solitude of those memories as surely as they are to the solitude of their own death. Those memories are a prison for each man in which he remains confined from birth to death. They are his death. It is because of their uniqueness that each man dies, because that is what dies, that is what is transient and never reborn in others, that is what amongst the crowds is doomed to die: the unique memories which feed the illusion of a shared rememberer whom death will ultimately erase."
ReplyDelete- "The Witness", Juan Jose Saer, p157-8