Thus the possibility of hearing the Word of Life is itself for each person and for each living Self contemporaneous with his birth and consubstantial… - Michel Henry

The possibility of expressing life through lines can be established, if we suppose that life is essentially -- in virtue of what makes it alive -- a force, and if we suppose that the forces acting simultaneously or successively on the point in such a way as to produce what we call straight, curved, or angular lines are in reality the forces of life, and that no other forces exist. Not only each force but each drive within the framework of subjectivity has its immediate equivalent in a specific linear form, since the force's intensity, its changes, the time of its action, its interruptions and its returns have their exact corollary in the genus (straight, curved or zigzag line) and accidents (slope of the curve, length of various segments and degree of the angles) of the linear forms described above.

Men turned away from Life’s Truth, caught in all the traps and marvels where this life is denied, ridiculed, mimicked, simulated – absent. Men given over to the insensible, become themselves insensible, whose eyes are empty as a fish’s. Dazed men, devoted to specters and spectacles that always expose their own invalidity and bankruptcy; devoted to false knowledge, reduced to empty shells, to empty heads – to “brains.” Men whose emotions and loves are just glandular secretions. Men who have been liberated by making them think their sexuality is a natural process, the site and place of their infinite Desire. Men whose responsibility and dignity have no definite site anymore. Men who in the general degradation will envy the animals. Men will want to die – but not Life. It is not just any god today who is still able to save us, but – when the shadow of death is looming over the world – that One who is Living.

What is true about heat and pain is also true about colour. The rock is no more red than it is hot or painful. It can only have a colour -- red, blue, yellow -- in the invisible life where the colour is felt, on the basis of 'feeling oneself' (se sentir soi-même). Life's feeling of itself and its feeling of colour is a pathos. Colour is not linked to a tonality through an external and contingent association that would vary with individuals. In the phenomenological substance of its flesh and being, colour is a sensation and subjectivity; it is this affective tonality and inner tone.