mself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who died young at
Amherst in the '80's, much lamented by those who knew him, was also
impressed by the revelation. "In the first place," he once wrote to
me, "Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if anything
non-emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, 'the one
sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how, the present is
pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future.
Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or accounting for
it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in
regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation of the past.' The
real secret would be the formula by which the 'now' keeps exfoliating
out of itself, yet never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps
existence exfoliating? The formal being of anything, the logical
definition of it, is static. For mere logic every question contains
its own answer--we simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why
are twice two four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic
finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is
a-going. But the revelation adds: it goes because it is and WAS
a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation.
Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own tail. The more he
hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his
heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already
a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at
the moment of recovery from anaesthesis, just then, BEFORE STARTING ON
LIFE, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the
eternal process just in the act of starting. The truth is that we
travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out; and the
real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when
we remain in, our destination (being already there)--which may occur
vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning.
That is why there is a smile upon the face of the revelation, as we
view it. It tells us that we are forever half a second too late--
that's all. 'You could kiss your own lips, and have all the fun to
yourself,' it says, if you only knew the trick. It would be perfectly
easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them. Why
don't you manage it somehow?"

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