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)