I wanted to give my post below as an example of the scenario I was trying (and failing) to articulate last fall. In this scenario, the failure of a speaker’s effort – an effort that up to this point seems determine the meaning of a conversation relative to a certain goal of longed-for persuasion or reconciliation – opens a deeper significance, a deeper communion, to those who choose to hang on to it after its immediate ends have become impossible; it sounds in and reveals the wider forum in which it has indeed already been secretly speaking.
The pressing ends (demanding heart and will) that govern our relation to the immediate, historical city collapse, and at that very moment an encompassing “city in speech” is revealed.
Hence my question of October which I hope sounds a little bit clearer now:
“What city begins where the city ends?”
Does this make more sense?
