AustLit

Epigraph:

A distressing feature in the life which you are about to enter, a feature which will press hardly upon the finer spirits among you and ruffle their equanimity, is the uncertainty which pertains not alone to our science and art, but to the very hopes and fears which make us men. In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable, and must be content with finding broken portions...Each one of us may pick up a fragment, perhaps two, and in moments when mortality weighs less heavily upon the spirit, we can, as in a vision, see the form divine, just as a great naturalist...can reconstruct an ideal creature from a fossil fragment. –Sir William Osler.

In its expression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business...The other man's death calls me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death to which the other, who cannot see it, is exposed; ...as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself, or more exactly, as if I had to answer for the other's death even before being. A guiltless responsibility, whereby I am not the less open to an accusation of which no alibi, spatial or temporal, could clear me...a responsibility stemming from a time before my freedom - before my beginning, before any present. –Emmanuel Levinas