Current chapter: All of a Sudden

Spring 2025

And all of a sudden — she’s back.

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, so let’s not get it too straight just yet. Instead, for a moment, imagine this strange scene:

It’s you, you’re in the middle of it, and you’re looking into the horizon. Between you and the vague grey, something is arriving. You look down at your hands. A rope runs through them. Right where the rope meets your skin, you hold on to it. There are many places to hold on to, but this one is yours. You follow it outwards with your eyes, and back again. It moves with you, around you. Could you tell a knot from a twist?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, too, was interested in discerning one thing from another. He developed an admirable sensitivity to the difference between endings and beginnings, the knowable and the mystical, to what matters and what doesn’t. When he ends his Tractatus with the words: “That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence,” he is giving us more than a recommendation of stillness for those moments when words don’t come easy. I think what I read of this book has stuck with me because of how freeing it felt to put naming on a leash. This might seem like a word’s world sometimes. Long story short, it’s not.

Back on the ropes, a person’s got to do something before it gets too late — so you pull. You pull, and something, somewhere, pulls from the other end. Something stretches out between you, and doing nothing, it grows all by itself. The rope sweeps out under your feet, and there are neither knots nor twists in this sobriety. There is, however, the inside of a precious pearl opening in the sky above you, or enter a fine morning.

And so it begins.

All of a sudden and all by itself, ancient colours return in modern gradients, and fearless light is everywhere.

We all love a good explanation, but that’s not what makes the sun rise.