XVIII.

Living by metonymy. Is this not what we do? Every time we come close to touching upon the essence of something, we do not dwell on it but hasten on in a continuum of "That reminds me of...". It is an infinite regression: We can only comprehend something in terms of something else and so on. We try to encircle our prey but only succeed in wandering further and further away from this essence that we thought we were looking for; getting enmeshed in a freak show of arbitrary similarities. How do we make new friends? By grasping some outer of inner feature that reminds of someone else. It is strange - by hastening after the past we propel ourselves into the future.
So we try to make sense of things by understanding their neighbors...and in like sense, we fear that which stands close to our enemies. The xenophobic posters of the right wing has realized this in some sense or another long ago.
We search for meaning constantly and compulsively. Of course always missing the point because we want to be spatio-temporally bound. "Standing close to" is an arbitrary statement at best; so we speed on, in jobs, families, educations and "projects"...still hoping to find some fixated point in time on which to hang the coat of our existence and relax.
But there can be no quarter; every moment is another moment of re-actualising and (worse yet!) re-constructing our moral structure. Every moment is a choice - and we shrink from this choice as night-creatures afraid of the light; putting on the masks of our personae so the mirror will at least show something.