Remainder recognizes, with Szymborska's poem, that we know, in the end, "less than little/And finally as little as nothing," and so tries always to acknowledge the void that is not ours, the messy remainder we can't understand or control—the ultimate marker of which is Death itself. We need not ever read a word of Heidegger to step in these murky waters. They flow through the "mainstream" of our canon. Through the negations of Beckett. The paradoxical concrete abstractions of Kafka. The scatological thingy-ness of Joyce at his most antic. The most famous line of Auden ("Poetry makes nothing happen"). They flow through our own lives in the form of anxiety, which is, in Freud's opinion, the only real emotion we have.

¶ 11:16 PM