The Institutional Life

Abstract

Some ten years ago I read for the first time the passage from which this contribution draws its title. It marks, for me, something like the beginning of an obsession–but one that only takes me in circles, back to those lines, where I find comfort alongside a certain sense of futility in a passage that I know I will never fully unravel. In this futile return there is a feeling of coming home, but also of a continuous departure which most often leads down familiar paths–all of them leading back to where I started–but also sometimes yielding a new route to travel both vainly, in the hope of a new discovery, and of course in vain, as these new paths always seem to take me back home; if I’m lucky a home that is somewhat altered, not necessarily rendered more or less clear to me but somehow deepened, given an added depth or dimension. But each departure is nonetheless accompanied by a marvelous sensation of quickening, a nervousness or jitteriness that pushes me to literally move, to get up from my desk and pace nervously, a sort of push that must be redirected back into the text from which it emerged.