What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudde… - Roland Barthes

A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers — a kind of sclerosis.

[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface — or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

I waver — in the dark — between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I’m unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together — and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman’s death.