Meanwhile, the husband and the wife are still sleeping separately, are still putting their arms around each other often and fucking when they want. I assume this based on what I know, which is to say on extrapolation from what I have been told. I assume, too, a time limit to their experiment: each of them senses it but doesn’t want to admit it to the other. They may be caught in the same form as were Porous and Anemone, their definitions mismatched, futurity meters out of sync.

It’s too bad, I think, when I think of them. The form is not of their design. The anarchist would say, did in fact say, “We never know all the virtues that might give content to our lives, we have just started thinking on these matters and so any eternal principle we may want to defend today will most likely be overruled tomorrow.”

He also said, or wrote, that “a life without mystery is barren and that some things, for example our friends, should be loved rather than understood.”

This may also go for husbands and wives, or for other pairs and groups of people entering into relations of intimacy based, either positively or negatively, on that of husband and wife.

Or it may not. This is among the underlying subjects of both Love and Anti-Love.

The anarchist’s formulation about love without understanding calls to mind the stack of books on the coffee table (archive, morgue). I pick one up—Pascal’s Pensées in English translation, bought for a dollar months ago and unopened until now, though it’s not the first copy I’ve possessed, not the first time I’ve opened it and read.

My memory for books is bad; when I try to recall them, it’s as if whole passages and themes have been swiped away. Not just passages and themes. Let me give you an example.

The first paragraphs of Pensées propose a distinction between intuitive thinkers and mathematical thinkers. Between thought supported obliquely by common observation and thought supported directly by rarefied fact. I follow this distinction; I am a delighted reader. Entering Pascal’s numbered paragraphs, my delight is bodily, a flood of recognition: he is speaking to me!

But the second paragraph speaks of men, makes clear that it speaks only of men, and I am not a man. This revision, too, I feel in my body, as an assault. He is not speaking to me! A small sword—swipe, swipe.

The paragraphs, at the outset, nearly alternate: to me—not to me—to me again! Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.