What is considered most fundamental about relationships is their formation and their subsequent withering, faltering and disintegration. Before that, they change enormously in increments inside the lapses of time necessary for any of them to become memories. It means the causalities attributed to define relationships are, at best, superfluous if their goal is to help understand their qualities. It also means that to understand their qualities, a careful attending to those almost forgotten moments constituting them (Novalis’ “differential of the function of future and past”¹) has to be undertaken. Once this perspective is adopted, relationships become incredibly rich and complex, and require the refinement of distinctions and observations a mind can rarely afford to maintain for a stable period of time. Hence the underlying stream of most change and notable exceptions demands much effort to be attended to, and some of life’s most fantastic glimpses of itself are apprehended in the form of illumination, when a moment is lived long enough not to be possibly remembered in its tainted and impaired state.

¹Novalis, Werke, ed. Ewald Wasmuth, Heidelberg, 1957, vol. I, p. 129 (fragment 417)

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.

On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.

When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?

All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.

But when I call upon my dashing being,
out comes the same old lazy self,
and so I never know just who I am,
nor how many I am, nor who we will be being.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.