There were several directions in which to define the definitive.

That which has happened cannot happen again, Barthes seems to suggest. And yet — the nature of grief is that it keeps happening.

Grief keeps its own time, I said to my father.

“But we define time,” he replied, “we are the ones who create it.”

We create and are created in turn by our definitions of time, hope, humanity, feasibility, wisdom —

Alan Lightman says, “An object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.”

The fact that Lightman says this in a book titled Einstein’s Dreams does not mean he said it less.

Barthes used tiny sheets of paper to collect and preserve the dailiness of his grief.

“You should not perform grief,” a yoga instructor said.

What does it mean to perform the unspeakable?

I did a headstand and everyone clapped. They performed their appreciation.

What did Witold Gombrowicz perform when writing about the performance of others in the memoir excerpted below?

Alone, in the loge, I, a modern person, deprived of superstitions, I, an antisalon man, I out of whose head the whip of defeat had knocked the sulks and airs, thought that a world in which a man adores himself with music is more convincing than a world in which man adores the music itself.

I had the feeling that I was among Proust's characters, who went to the concert not to listen but to grace it with their presence, where the ladies stuck Wagner into their hair as they would a diamond pin.

It is ridiculous to perform one’s self.

One must use words in order to create alternatives to the paucity of existing language.

“Words are events,” said Ursula Le Guin.” They do things, change things. They transform at both speaker and her; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."

The energy of death.

The amplification of the void in strategies of avoidance.

A void dance.