You wonder what of your life is real given that it is located inside a larger field in which every momentary phase of subjective meaning is revalued and reinterpreted according more embracing and more stable meanings, deferred meanings, historical truths that are real but not yet revealed. You know it to be so placed because you live in a mental and critical epoch, proud of its dizzying self-criticism. What are we? Whatever it is we must say it, will say it sometime, declare what we stand for, what the beliefs are that we hold to and which we think are indispensable for making sense of the world. We align ourselves to larger currents, as we see them, which fix the value of things, or at least the general direction of what is good, what is on the side of the angels, and what is the opposite, and we are scandalised by the fact that not everyone agrees, at least in broad outline, and that there is apparently no procedure, no communicative reason by which a final consensus can be obtained. But we also know beforehand that we are wrong, at least about the most important parts, that everything will look different, be seen otherwise at another time, a time all too like our own, but not. We imagine we survived nihilism since everything seems to have kept on going, new generations replacing old ones, new hopes, new prospects, as before, and it has surely always seemed somewhat chaotic when you are still in the middle of it, but we don't know if any bells would have rung when the shadow-line was crossed. Come on, one more effort of mind, the harder it gets the better it is, we've outdone so much already, let's outdo ourselves.