Millimetres

(the sensation of slight things)

The present is ancient, because everything from the past was in the present when it existed, and so I have an antique dealer’s fondness for things precisely because they belong to the present, and I have the wrath of an outrivalled collector for anyone who tries to replace my mistaken notions about things with plausible and even provable, scientifically based arguments.

The various points that a butterfly successively occupies in space are various things which, to my astonished eyes, remain visible in space. My recollections are so intense that.....

But it is only the subtlest sensations of the slightest things that I live intensely. Perhaps this is due to my love of futility. Or maybe it’s because of my concern for detail. But I’m inclined to believe – I can’t say I know, for these are things I never bother to analyse – that it’s because slight things, having absolutely no social or practical importance, are for that very reason absolutely free of sordid associations with reality. Slight things smack to me of unreality. The useless is beautiful because it’s less real than the useful, which continues and extends, whereas the marvellously futile and the gloriously minuscule stay where and as they are, living freely and independently. The useless and the futile open up humbly aesthetic interludes in our real lives. What dreams and fond delights are stirred in my soul by the puny existence of a pin in a ribbon! What a pity for those who don’t realize how important this is!

Among the sensations that inwardly torture us to the point of becoming pleasurable, the disquiet provoked by the world’s mystery is one of the most common and complex. And that mystery is never more evident than when we contemplate tiny things, which don’t move and are therefore perfectly translucent, allowing their mystery to show through. It’s harder to feel mystery when contemplating a battle (and yet to meditate on the absurdity of there being people and societies and conflicts between them is what can most unfurl in our minds the flag of triumph over mystery) than when contemplating a small stone on the road which, since it brings to mind no idea beyond that of its existence, will naturally and necessarily lead us – if we keep thinking about it – to consider the mystery of its existence.

Blessed be instants and millimetres and the shadows of tiny things, which are even more humble than the things themselves! Instants..... Millimetres – how astonished I am by their audacity to exist side by side and so close together on a tape measure. Sometimes these things make me suffer or rejoice, and then I feel a kind of gut pride.

I’m an ultrasensitive photographic plate. All details are engraved in me out of all proportion to any possible whole. The plate fills up with nothing but me. The outer world that I see is pure sensation. I never forget that I feel.