Michel Serres on writing:

I do not know who it was that said that one does not write initially with ideas, but by making use of words. That is such a shallow thing to say. In the beginning is not the word. The word comes where it is expected. One writes initially through a wave of music, a groundswell that comes from the background noise, from the whole body, maybe, and maybe from the depths of the world or through the front door, or from our latest loves, carrying its complicated rhythm, its simple beat, its melodic line, a sweet wafting, a broken fall. One cannot grip one's pen but this thing, which does not yet have a word, takes off. In the beginning is the song. Language is not the subject, it is still less the infra-subject, why bother with this useless repduplication? The words then easily take their places along the line of this volley or the lines of this volume, even the strictest mathematicians know that one cannot invent or demonstrate anything without the coming of the secret and right harmony of the notation. Then the musical wave embraces space: does it drive away the fury? does it wipe out the murmuring? I do not know, I know that at times it steps aside, painfully negotiating the noise, spreading somewhere else, forming a new space still unknown to the squabbling, it invents a blank space, out of the shouting, out of the hell, where it can lay out its peaceable feasts and its fragile truth value, before the noise shrouds it in night. Under the the word and language, this wave, and beneath the wave, the black noise. The unknown, the infra-subject of hate and multiplicity, open chaos, and closed simply under the numbers. At the seeding of the wave and the surge, as at the beginning of the world, is the echo of pandemonium. The word will be its messiah, and the idea will be the messiah of the messiah, awaited in the noise, hoped for in the raising up of the musical renaissance.

If you love only those who love you and to the extent that they love you, if you hold so strictly to this symmetry, mutuality, and reciprocity, then you give nothing, no love, and the reserve of your wages will be like a tax that is imposed or a debt that is repaid, like the acquittal of a debt. In order to deserve or expect an infinitely higher salary, one that goes beyond the perception of what is due, you have to give without taking account and love those who don’t love you.

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death

With respect to the external world, an initial sanity requires recognizing that I cannot live my skepticism, whereas with respect to others a final sanity requires recognizing that I can. I do.

Stanley Cavell