The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now-and the ship had gone.

When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now — and the ship had gone.

"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."

In secret pleasure — secret tears
This changeful life has slipped away

no reality is mine, no reality belongs to me (to us), we all live somewhere else, beyond where we are, we are all a reality different from the word I or the word we; our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not ours, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not I or you or he, the self is neither mine nor yours, it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is the perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses? are the eyes that look at what I write the same eyes that I say are looking at what I write? we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self s own extinction, we come and go: the reality beyond names is not habitable and the reality of names is a perpetual falling to pieces, there is nothing solid in the universe, in the entire dictionary there is not a single word on which to rest our heads, everything is a continual coming and going from things to names to things, no, I say that I perpetually come and go but I haven’t moved, as the tree has not moved since I began to write, inexact expressions once again: I began, I write, who is writing what I am reading?, the question is reversible: what am I reading when I write: who is writing what I am reading?

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate – for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

How fleeting is this world yet it survives. It is ourselves that fade from it and our ephemeral lives.

...love letters that aren't read fade away. ("Cartographies")

Their lives were now less than a footnote in history. As gone, as utterly forgotten as any random individual from the Middle Ages. No longer even a ripple in time, except to the extent that I could keep their memories alive.

One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.