malfeasance morning

On the train south towards the office, reading Jean-Phillippe Toussaints Urgency and Patience (in a rather nice paperback edition from Dalkey Archive). The train has the usual array of people of people sitting and standing, reading and consuming objects that should never have been made, freesheet newspapers and magazines, social media feeds, reality TV programmes through headsets and mass consumptive computer devices. The pages pass as easily as the train travels along the tracks towards the city. Somewhere after Baker Street and before Kings Cross, the young man to my left says to me that the text is incredibly dense, you read a paragraph he says and realise the random collection of words is supposed to make sense but… we talk about the text, Walter Benjamin, Husserl, the dialectical image, Nymphs… but mostly about the understandable nature of the text if read as a single object. We don’t speak of how long it takes to acquire human skills, in this case reading and understanding a singular philosophical text by Toussaint, but equally it could be constructing a piece of software, building a bridge, walking along a Church roof, having a working human relationship, i did not speak of the unvarying ten years required. But instead we talked about the dialectical image, subjectivity and objectivity, the difficultly of meaning, that the text is only readable because of the many other texts already read, saying Agamben but actually referring to the decades of work… In this fleeting moment, one of many fleeting moments that everyday life is full of i remember other such moments, relationships constituted and then passed. The train arrived at Farringdon Station, a little reluctantly I left the stranger on the train, the temporary We that He and I constituted and left the station walking south to the white office…