This is a ladder.
To be a table.
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
I have still to figure out who I am speaking to when I am thinking. Reflection requires distance and light. To understand is not to move my furniture around, not that I haven’t tried, to push a table afar from anything and contemplate on what a table is when I am the table and nothing is around. It is just as well to contemplate what solitude is when one is solitude.
One means there is no other. There is no solitude in loneliness as there is no table outside a world. Where a world is a room and a room is an assortment of furniture within walls, floor and ceiling; furniture always being plural within the singular and walls always being singular within the plural. The floor and ceiling always being parallel to one another, at least at this point in time. Not because of architectural grammar but because of a physiological syntax.[1]
[1]The multiplicity of points or ‘heres’ can in the nature of things be constituted only by a chain of experiences in which on each occasion one and no more of them is presented as an object, and which is itself built up in the heart of this space. And finally, far from my body’s being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body. p. 106
There's always time when one is not alone.
I stand upright. Permanence is not parallel. It’s a nail on a wall with a frame. Permanence is vertical. It requires a surface “naked as paper to start”[1]. It moves like writing forward and backward. Knowledge is horizontal where permanence is vertical. When I stand upright, I am permanent. When I stand upright, I take some amount of space, a small amount, I become the smallest I can amount to. I elongate my time by constricting my space[2]. I am eternal. I am a day. Always present; always not tomorrow.