The void confronts me with myself, a thing which is repellent because full of truth. The self here is different from the body and different from the image. The body is that which acts, it is not seen except peripherally. A photograph is an object, a piece of glossy paper. It is external. A mirror reflects back an image; it is what we show and take ourselves to be. We are filmed, and we get a different image, perhaps more accurate.
But none of these approach the self. The self always reveals itself as and with a void. It is full of silence, and the terrible message of this silence is that it bears no message. It is incapable of messages. My thoughts are repelled by it, and stray to sordid doubt, self-pity, fears.
What can be known with a certainty about the future? That it will contain good and bad. That it will be somewhat like, and yet wholly unlike, this moment. And what can be said, in particular, of my future? That there will be nights when distractions and amusements will fail, and a void, a frightening silence, will intervene.
What to make of this space? Most will say, in effect, distract yourself further, take your mind away from it, place your attention somewhere else. For this void results from a mere drift of attention, the drift of attention is what makes it known, what reveals it. I think rather that it has lurked there all along, as it were behind everything, while i pursued my distractions, a full and complete thing before which my distractions were shadows. But this fullness and this truth is frightening because it carries with it not only a mute finality but a suspicion that words are useless, that thought is useless, the truth being that truth itself is fugitive and all my endeavours intricately futile, my grasping at facts to find that they are like snowflakes, they turn to nothing in my hand.
