X, who left for his vacation without me, has shown no signs of life since his departure: accident? post-office strike? indifference? distancing maneuver? exercise of a passing impulse of autonomy ("His youth deafens him, he fails to hear")? or simple innocence? I grow increasingly anxious, pass through each act of the waiting-scenario. But when X reappears in one way or another, for he cannot fail to do so (a thought which should immediately dispel any anxiety), what will I say to him? Should I hide my distress—which will be over by then ("How are you?")? Release it aggressively (“That wasn’t at all nice, at least you could have . . ") or passionately (“Do you know how much worry you caused me?”)? Or let this distress of mine be delicately, discreetly understood, so that it will be discovered without having to strike down the other ("I was rather concerned . . .”)? A secondary anxiety seizes me, which is that I must determine the degree of publicity I shall give to my initial anxiety.

Accidentally, Werther’s finger touches Charlotte’s, their feet, under the table, happen to brush against each other. Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foot, fetishistically, without concern for the response (like God—as the etymology of the word tells us—the Fetish does not reply). But in fact Werther is not perverse, he is in love: he creates meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.

(A British lord, and subsequently a bishop, blamed Goethe for the epidemic of suicides provoked by Werther. To which Goethe replied in in strictly economic terms: “Your commercial system has claimed thousands of victims, why not grant a few to Werther?”)

[...] We might call it a proffering, which has no scientific place: I-love-you belongs neither in the realm of linguistics nor in that of semiology. Its occasion (the point of departure for speaking it) would be, rather, Music. [...]

“When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: ‘Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed.”

"It is a glorious summer, and I often sit up in the trees of Lotle’s orchard and take down with a long pole the pears from the highest branches. She stands below and catches them when I lower the pole.” Werther is telling his story, ready and speaks in the present tense, but his scene already has the vocation of a remembrance; in an under- tone, the imperfect tense murmurs behind this present. One day, I shall recall the scene, I shall lose myself in the past. The amorous scene, like the first ravishment, consists only of after-the-fact manipulations: this is anamnesis, which recovers only insignificant features in no way dramatic, as if I remembered time itself and only time: it is a fragrance without support, a texture of memory; something like a pure expenditure, Japanese haiku has been able to such as only the articulate, without
recuperating it in any destiny.

(To gather the figs from the high branches in the garden in B., there was a long bamboo pole and a tin funnel stamped with rosettes that was fastened to it: this childhood memory functions in the same way as an amorous one.)

There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we must return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join. The tender gesture says: ask me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire you—a little, lightly, without trying to seize anything right away.