Tuesday, 1 November 2016



There is not one but an indefinite family of self feelings which are are organised in a tree-like fashion. Given any such feeling there are certain other of these feelings that precede and dominate it and which can be triggered in all sorts of different ways, and although it is not fully under our control we can move up the tree without ever knowing if it leads to a single point of origin - in which case the hierarchy would be in some sense real - or whether it just goes on and on in which case it would surely be just an ideal structure and therefore illusory. Self-feelings are not the only family of phenomena that appear in this way, it is a pattern that is correlative not merely to the idea of truth but to the acknowledgement of the overwhelming and thrilling experience of truthfulness. Among the distinctive and arresting self-feelings, or soul-feelings, there are those aroused by sudden childhood memories which have an immediately authentic resonance. We instinctively place these next to the image of death, as if they are what stands on the lip of the abyss of non-being. As much as this is felt and expressed by yielding to the urge to tell a story in which the gift of endless circumstance can be shared, it also seems as though something would be missed by doing so. The memory was a doorway, not just into further memories, but into deeper layers of the constitution of the self. If the feeling of soul can be nothing other than the concrete realisation of properness, with more than a nod to the French sense of propre, then by enclosing this cloud of meaning in a self-sufficient whole, it ceases to be something whose destiny is to be realised on the level of events, and becomes the point of transition beyond the personal, not into the impersonal, but facing onto the a-personal. Not the story of a soul but the hypostasis of Soul.

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