VN was haunted by the darkness that's generated by unconsciousness [ "Let me quote a paragraph in my book Ada: " [ ..].In every individual life there goes on, from cradle to deathbed, the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong." This is Van speaking, Van Veen, the charming villain of mv book. I have not decided yet if I agree with him in all his view's on the texture of time. I suspect I don't. (Interview, BBC-2, 1969)], while trying to escape the predominant representations that rely on space to contain the ancient circular time and eternal recurrence, or the Christian irreversible historical line going from cradle to grave ( in Jean Cocteau's unforgettable definition:"la vie est une chute horizontale").

How does VN's imagined radiant "crack", "chasm," "slit", "fissure" lie in space? He writes about "before and after," "back and fore," "past and future," "retrospective and prospective," indirectly pointing to a horizontal patch. And yet, it must have lain vertically (either ascending or descending or, as in Jacob's ladder, doing both*?). What was, for him, "metaphysical time"?

* Speak, Memory: "All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman bind ing me to the block; and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar axe is coming out of its great velvet-lined case, initially I had no such com fort or defense: I had nothing—save a door left slightly ajar into Mademoiselle's room. Its vertical line of meek light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep[...] a chink in the dark still bespoke a speck of myself in nothingness [...] And all the time I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.[...] In ...pitchy blackness I lose my bearings..."