"When I have done with the world I have created an amorphous transparent mass and the world in all its variety is left on one side like an uninteresting lumber room.”
Isn’t this a rather common experience on the completion of an essay or other piece of work? One has bothered oneself with the form of the essay, making it internally consistent etc At the end, the distinct impression is that yes, it is internally consistent, polished etc but just on that account has lost touch with its object. The timbre of the essay and the timber of the world are different substances. In tidying up or polishing the former the roughness and irregularity of the latter is discarded like so much adventitious dross.
More generally: We have the sense that in producing a conceptual or poetic structure, there is always a price to be paid in the form of an ‘indivisible remainder’, something indefinable that our language has failed to grasp.
The illusion is often that this remainder was the essential thing, that the essence has therefore escaped you. But this remainder has no ontological consistency. It is simply that which remains.
A rough analogy: using a net of a x gauge will fail to catch fish of a certain size, but these uncaught ones are not a definite category of fish. Nor are they, rather than the fish you have caught, the hard indefinable reality of the fish world.
Also, W: “The pleasure I take in my thoughts is the pleasure in my own strange life”
In writing the essay, I have been pursuing (in part) my ‘own strange [singular] life’ – writing is the only place where this ‘strange life’ is revealed to itself. this has eclipsed what I have been writing about.
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