among other things that grew out of your speaking of clock time and the field of jouissance, is the memory of a suffering poet, who, through the experience of non-time, came to know {further on in this same text} that l o v e was his only truth…
. . .
from de profundis - oscar wilde
Suffering is one long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle around one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life, every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and walk and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seedtime or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with b r o k e n b l o s s o m s , or strewn with fallen fruit, we know nothing, and can know nothing. For us there is only one season, the season of Sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always midnight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.”
