“I will write down my thoughts here in no order, but not perhaps in aimless confusion. It is the true order and will still show my aim by its very disorder.”

— from Pascal’s Pensees
— Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “The Fragment: Elements of a Definition,” in The Fragment: An Incomplete History, ed. Williagm Tronzo (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009), 125.

prelude


 

We learn as a child that every snowflake is unique. Crayon drawings of blue scribbles with scattered white dots grow up to become kaleidoscopic cut-outs that cling to our windows like magnified talismans. Snowfalls assume a more magical aura. All those snowflakes, all those billions of individual, distinct snowflakes, if only we could capture every single one so we could see the wonder of each, before they melted away.

 
Amanda Clyne, "Rebecca", video stills, 2012

Amanda Clyne, "Rebecca", video stills, 2012

“The widespread idea that everything must be said and can be resolved by language, that every problem is a topic for debate, that philosophy can be reduced to questions and answers, that one can only cure oneself by talking, that discourse is the only way of teaching anything, this theatrical, garrulous, publicity-seeking idea, lacking shame and modesty, is oblivious to the real presence of bread and wine, their unspoken taste and odour, it forgets how to raise infants through barely discernible gestures, about connivance and complicity, and things that go without saying, unspoken expressions of love, impossible intuitions that strike like lightening, the charm that lingers behind someone’s outward bearing; this judicial idea condemns the timid, those who are not always convinced of their own opinions and those who do not know what they think, researchers; this didactic idea excludes those who do not attend classes, humble folk, inventors, the hesitant and sensitive, men of intellect and labourers, the grief-stricken and the poor in spirit; I have known so many things without texts, so many people without grammar, children without lexicon, the elderly without vocabulary; I have lived so much in foreign lands, mute, terrified behind the curtain of languages, would I have really tasted life if all I had done was listen and speak? The most precious things I know are embedded in silence.”

— Michel Serres
— Michel Serres, The Five Senses, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 105.
 
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