...fleeting image...
“Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I
lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased
to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the
future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully
conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run
after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run
after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have
never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with
it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.
What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it.”
―
Eugène Ionesco,
Fragments of a Journal
What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it.”
“But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules
of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain
mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all
that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the
enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce,
what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not
to know, if there is nothing to know, why do we have this longing to
know?”
―
Eugène Ionesco,
Fragments of a Journal
“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things,
is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or
remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams
do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence
of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”
―
Eugène Ionesco
