All writing is an extended preface to an event that never takes place. The words are given but then they are no longer given; the absence of words is the proper object of the words, the default of interest the sole door to meaning. There is a great deal of repetition, but this marks out the traces of the event; it is in a time before and also a time after. The promesse de bonheur can be looked at from either direction as long as it remains a promise, and even more so when it has long ceased to be one. The world is a geography: places, rooms, locations, bodies, where acts of life have been anticipated, accomplished, left their patina, and are to occur still - ordinary acts but in their finitude not to be substituted by any imagining of yours. Place is where souls never cease from making the world, weaving it out of their own purposes and desires, and endowing it with its obduracy. And while others thicken it, your meanings are your undoings, since whatever has been understood can never recur; your making uses up your world, frame by frame, moment by moment, irrevocably undreaming it.