| The paradox of the series. The first element in a series never presents itself as the first at the time of its occurrence. It takes at least another element to establish that there is even a series there, a repetition, a pattern. One can establish a series only in retrospect, looking back from later. The first element in a series is always late on the scene, at least the third. The trivial becomes the pivotal, and the time one looks back over is always strange. What holds things together may be a not yet. |
I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives. James Joyce, Ulysses, ch 7 |
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Groucho
Marx: What does the second sentence do to the first? |
Reading is never a matter of the accumulation of units, like the trickle of bytes down the phone line into the computer: as if the first word of the sentence gives a little information, the second builds a little more on that, and so on until the end of the sentence. The basic unit of meaning is not the single word but--minimally--the utterance. The word means nothing on its own: its sense waits on what will follow, which is to say on what has not yet arrived; and it looks back to all the other words which have been uttered, to rewrite them. And as every utterance connects to another, that sense is never closed. Texts are not streams, they're incessant temporal whirlpools. |
(The idiocy of hypertext theory: to mistake what happens in texts for the typographical progression of print across the page.)
Time
