It is not only that reality recedes, but that it does so most clearly when we believe we are about to make contact. Vila-Matas, in Dublinesque, describes this delicately: “reality knows how to slip away behind an infinite series of footsteps, levels of perception, false soundings.” When I read this, I thought less of fiction than of those ordinary moments in daily life when something seems ready to disclose itself (a glance, a gesture, a fragment of overheard speech) only to dissolve back into the undifferentiated flow of experience. Still, we persist in believing that meaning waits for us, slightly beyond reach, waiting to be drawn into language.
I have returned to this passage several times, not out of a wish for clarification, but because it seems to allow a gentler relation to the pursuit of understanding. The notion that reality is “inextinguishable, unreachable,” but still worth approaching, seems to mirror the reading I most value. It is not the kind of reading that seeks mastery, but one that allows itself to move closer to something that will never fully resolve.
Vila-Matas allows for surprises. They do not arrive as revelations or answers, but as slight shifts in how something is held in the mind (a reorientation, a new inflection, a loosening of what once seemed fixed). In certain moods, that feels sufficient.
Beautiful!
Interesting. I say that reality is that which is right in front of you. And that this stuff that is fleeting and that you can never grasp and, all that stuff that is supposedly outside of knowing… I think it’s just part of being a real human