in a cosmic flux

“Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads, with a woman who feels too much, with a woman who writes … Don’t fall in love with a woman who is educated, magical, delerious, crazy. Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks, who knows what she knows and furthermore knows how to fly; a woman who is sure of herself. Don’t fall in love with a woman who laughs or weeps while making love,, who knows how to transform her flesh into spirit, and even less with a woman who loves poetry (for they are the most perilous of all) or who can spend a half an hour contemplating a painting and cannot live without music. Don’t fall in love with a woman who is interested in politics and who rebels and feels an immense horror of injustice. A woman who likes nothing on television, and whose face and body are of no account to her beauty. Don’t fall in love with a woman who is intense, playful, lucid and irreverent. You will not like falling in love with a woman such as this, for, should you fall in love with such a woman, whether she stays with you or not, whether she loves you or not, from such a woman there is no return.”

“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”

The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

“I love what I see because one day I’ll stop seeing it. I also Love it because it is.”

Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.