Anne Dufourmantelle

true enemy of gentleness is … gentleness. Fake gentleness, mawkishness, this passivity sold to us via every New Age commercial technique, of relaxation or of an overused meaning of “zen.”

is all of this simultaneously without being any one of these elements more than the other.

When they are not despised, the gentle are persecuted or sanctified. We abandon them because gentleness as power shows us the reality of our own weakness.

Aristotle’s idea of potentiality—the power to change,

Aristotle’s idea of potentiality—the power to change,

appears on the threshold of passages signed off by birth and death.

In the quest that commits a subject to interrogate their past, there are not necessarily accompanying revelations but displacements that can lift the weight of curses and the logic that perpetuates their violence. Sometimes when secrets are disarmed, their toxicity returns in force. Like us, they’re in becoming. Their process of transformation never stops, even in the frozen time of trauma. For even in the most naked anxiety dwells a possible metamorphosis.

To respect the intimate space of the other is to make an alliance with the night without wanting to put an end to it, to imagine that light isn’t the opposite of the dark but its most secret ally, and to recognize in the secret—acts, thoughts, emotions—the opposite of a threat, the very condition of relation.

The thing to do now is to turn away from these moments of intimacy with the self: Silence is replaced by noise, almost continuous chatter, the omnipresence of screens