departures (7)

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

    --T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men.

I only wish departure did too: with a bang, with a clash, with a thud, whatever. With a clear beginning and a definite end.

It doesn't. It begins much earlier than you'd like to think and its pain never ends (even when you think it has).

Life seen from the perspective of death indeed; time put in parenthesis, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, disconnected from an-other's time.

So remote -- and yet you too enduring this never-ending, unbearable now. 

*       *       *

Pain breaks down the path of time I am extending; I fall back from the future I was pursuing and the past whose resources I was drawing on, to sink into a time of enduring. In the pain I have a foreboding of the time of dying. The other suffers in another interval without equivalent and in a pain in which I can nowise displace him. Pain blisters in intervals of time coming from nowhere, going nowhere, disconnected from the past and future of life, of the transpersonal enterprises, of the evolution of the planet.

Yet it is out of that other time, the time of his or her dying, that the other addresses me.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 235.