Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.
The purity of man is the absence of something, the purity of Jesus is the presence of something.
We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.
Even on the old show, we would maybe not all be in the scene. Sometimes there would be a penthouse scene and everyone would get together. But, even in that context, it would be because somebody was missing.
My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
A certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful presence; I do not know. What I do know is that he has a perfectly delightful absence.
It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
