There is also a whole region of the absent which embraces not the vanished, but that which has not yet arrived. On the pathway of time, the individual is always somehow in the middle. There are events, persons, thoughts, and novelties ahead that have not yet arrived. This is the territory of the unknown. We are always reaching forward with open gestures into the future. Much of our thinking endeavours to invite the unknown to disclose itself. This is especially true of questions. The question is the place where the unknown becomes articulate and active in us. The question is impatient with the unrevealed. It reaches forward to open doors in the unknown. The question attempts to persuade absence to yield its concealed presences. All perception works at this threshold. Unknown to ourselves we are always unveiling new worlds that lie barely out of reach. This is where the imagination is fully creative. All language, thought, creativity, prayer, and action live out of that fissure between word and thing, longing and fulfilment, subject and object.
There are invisible furrows of absence everywhere.