"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.)