medley

The compulsion to repudiate those things which are close to you: family, children, country, nation. As though you have to disown what is given to  you – for fear of loosing them or having to give it back? To keep e prophylactic distance from one’s own – but first from oneself, one’s own name, one’s own body, one’s own face.

And speaking of faces: you gauge the flow of time only through others, whose faces are much fairer and crueler faces than our own image. This is doubtless because we recognize them through all their changing appearances, while one never recognizes oneself: one always rectifies one’s image by reference to an ideal face from which one’s present face is merely an exception, and never a definitive one.