As soon as I wrote that page, it became clear to me that my pursuit of exactitude was forking in two directions: on one hand, the reduction of incidental events to abstract schemes that could be used to perform operations and demonstrate theorems; on the other, the effort of words to convey as precisely as possible the perceptible aspect of things.Indeed my writing has always found itself facing two divergent roads that correspond to two kinds of knowledge: one that moves through mental spaces of disembodied rationality, in which lines can be drawn that connect points, projections, abstract shapes, vectors of force; another that moves in a space crowded with objects and seeks to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling pages with words, in a meticulous effort to match the writte...