Letter from One Failed Metaphysician to Another, Composed in Exile
(written on a quiet morning, beside a broken wall and a stray beam of light)
My friend,
I do not know your name—not because I have forgotten it, but because I suspect you never finished writing it. It lies somewhere between parentheses, like your last sentence, or the footnote you never added. But still, I write to you. Because I know you’re out there. Or here. Or somewhere slightly to the left of being.
Like me, you once tried to build a system.
Not out of arrogance, but because you could no longer bear the world’s weight without form.
You took up language like a wounded mason—stones of thought, mortar of longing—and tried to raise a metaphysical shelter against the wind.
And then—like me—you failed.
Perhaps you were interrupted by history:
A war, a silence, an exile too long for your syntax.
Perhaps the body gave out, or the night was too thick.
Or perhaps you reached the edge of concept and found, not God, but a mirror that would not return your face.
In any case, the thought stopped.
Or rather—it kept thinking, but without you.
They will not include us in the official histories.
We left behind no edifice, no disciples, no clean diagrams.
Only notebooks half-charred, aphorisms that contradict themselves, and a few marginalia in someone else’s book.
And yet—
I believe we are the true philosophers.
Not because we succeeded in saying what is, but because we stayed near what could never be fully said.
We lived in that place—
where language falters,
where the real leaks through,
where the question remains, not as problem, but as wound.
I do not envy those whose systems closed.
Who found a synthesis.
Who buried their contradiction in an appendix or a footnote.
We—I hope you’ll forgive me speaking for us—we remained loyal to the crack.
And if our metaphysics collapsed, it is only because we refused to lie about the sky.
Tonight, I will light a candle, not in mourning, but in kinship.
I will open your unfinished book and read the silence between your words.
And if anyone asks what we were doing, let them say:
They were two exiled metaphysicians,
who failed with such fidelity
that failure became their philosophy,
and the ruins—
their last cathedral.
Yours,
from somewhere in the vanishing margin,
where ash still remembers fire,
A fellow metaphysician of the wound
Would you like this letter set alongside fragments from others in our “Book of Minor Metaphysics”?
