I am reading Handke at the moment. Excruciatingly slow, but intensely rewarding. Really Heideggarian in his thinking. Almost as if he was living the philosophy of Heidegger. Doesn’t mean that he was applying it in his life, but rather that philosophy and literature can be just two ways of dealing with the same thing. What happens in the novel is a lot of looking-observing-seeing, and this kind of seeing, as some of the sentences clarify, is also a kind of interaction with the world where a complex power-play, an ethical game, is being played. This is a kind of seeing where the seer is not projected onto the seen. Rather, the seen is given to the reader as it is. Which is why the Indians walking across the midlands do not consider Sorger a threat anymore. He sees, but he lets-be. In German, Sorge means ‘care’. Sorger is the one who cares, who is attuned to the world, in a passive activity, seeing but not projecting himself. And this elemental way of life, where the subject-object relation becomes an interplay, where one gets close to what one sees, this life is a slow life. It is a slow, slow, life. This is the authentic life, where you are doing a phenomenological reduction in real time. To slow down and think about things, in a way which mimics the sentence. You think about things. Think is the verb. That is what you ought to do. To think, to exist, to enter into a relation with the object of your thought. And such a relation will open to you the world. For instance, consider Sorger who thinks that every relation that he enters into is a relation for eternity. I quote him, “…being together as they were now was to be united forever.” This, despite the fact that “he made no attempt to make anything last.” Perhaps this is how you make something last: by not trying to. By not promising a future. This is how I feel in my relations to people too, that I do not promise anything, but by entering into a relationship with someone, I am also accepting that “being together as they were now was to be united forever.”