echoes (II)

“What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and powerless thought” (1)

”the business of thinking is like Penelope’s web ; it undoes every morning what it has finished the night before. For the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of wise men; it can be satisfied only through thinking” (2)

So it is precisely the futility & inconclusiveness of thinking which keeps us all thinking? But it wasn’t this tantalizing paradox that made me underline that first sentence – rather I was moved by the bestowing of confidence upon a "solitary & powerless thought".

And then cheered by the silent echo of the Penelope quote. (As if all those half forgotten thought fragments, floating about in my head , do make sense & might be woven into a web, one day).

(1) Adorno as quoted by Edward Said in “on late style”
(2) Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind