2023-04-21 09:16:04
But one also comes across a type of self-awareness that concerns itself exclusively with the form of things. For this type of self-awareness, the antinomy between seeing and existing is decisive, since it involves the question of how the core of the apple can be seen through the ordinary, red, opaque skin, and also how the eye that looks at that glossy red apple from the outside can penetrate into the apple and itself become the core. The apple in this case, moreover, must have a perfectly ordinary existence, its color a healthy red.
To continue the metaphor, let us picture a single, healthy apple. This apple was not called into existence by words, nor is it possible that the core should be completely visible from the outside like Amiel's peculiar fruit. The inside of the apple is naturally quite invisible. Thus at the heart of that apple, shut up within the flesh of the fruit, the core lurks in its wan darkness, tremblingly anxious to find some way to reassure itself that it is a perfect apple. The apple certainly exists, but to the core this existence as yet seems inadequate; if words cannot endorse it, then the only way to endorse it is with the eyes. Indeed, for the core the only sure mode of existence is to exist and to see at the same time. There is only one method of solving this contradiction. It is for a knife to be plunged deep into the apple so that it is split open and the core is exposed to the light--to the same light, that is, as the surface skin. Yet then the existence of the cut apple falls into fragments; the core of the apple sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing.
* * *
Death began from the time when I set about acquiring an existence other than that of words.
For however destructive a garb they might assume, words were deeply bound up with my instinct for survival, were a part of my very life. Was it not, essentially, when I first felt the desire to live that I began for the first time to use words effectively? It was words that would make me live on until I died a natural death; they were the slow-moving germs of a "sickness unto death."
* * *
I was still in my P.T. clothes: long white cotton training pants just issued that day, rubber gym shoes, a running shirt. Even the mud that already soiled the bottom of the pants contributed to my sense of wellbeing.
That morning's training in handling a parachute, the extraordinarily rarified feeling as for the first time one committed oneself to the empty air, still lingered inside me, a transparent residue, fragile as a medicinal wafer.
* * *
Unfortunately, moreover, the only liquid that might quench my thirst was that which others had drained before me.
8 viewsВася Лопатина, 06:16
Т
