Fare thee well
I am quitting again, or, in more accurate words, I am again saying farewell.
Fare thee well. Fare well. Farewell. Goodbye. Colloquially, it is said by or to someone who departs, and it is a wishing well of someone in their travels, implicitly in a direction different from one you are taking or from where you are staying. It is said by and/or to one who will go away in a different land (whether metaphorically or topographically), or by and/or on whom you do not wish ill when you part ways. There is movement in that word, a movement to and from, which are in, by the demands of the word itself, different if not opposite directions.
There is something strange about farewells.
It is a cutting off: goodbye, we might not see each other again, we will end here.
It is, however, also a well-wishing: fare well, we might not see each other again, but in your future endeavors, I wish you good happenings.
It is a schizophrenic word and concept, for in its very utterance there is a different topography instituted, one of possibilities of future happenings without you, but simultaneously an evocation of a spirit of a withness that accompanies every wish in the very act of severing this withness.
It is as such a bastard of a word, one which by all rights should have no rights at all to a future, good- or ill-wished. By all demands it should be a death, but it is stubborn in its persistence, in its non-death: fare well, I will not be with you, but let no harm befall you while I stay gone.
In other words, a farewell always already overreaches every time it is said. It cannot help but to.
As such it shares in this overreach the same nature of a promise. A promise is always a promise made with forever in mind, in exactly the opposite manner a farewell has forever in mind. I will stay gone, but fare well, in this time that I am gone. I will end this here, but you should not end. Promise me that you will not end here, because I in turn promise that I will not end here.
Because it speaks of an end to a relation, it is a death. But because it wishes (because it cannot help but wish) then it overreaches itself and says: you better stay alive, even when I am not here. Or because I am not here.
It is a strange word full of contradictory hermeneutic co-habitations, one that, by all that is right, should not be said in order for it to be truly a goodbye, but must be said, in order for it to fare at all.
Fare thee well. Fare well. Farewell. Goodbye. Colloquially, it is said by or to someone who departs, and it is a wishing well of someone in their travels, implicitly in a direction different from one you are taking or from where you are staying. It is said by and/or to one who will go away in a different land (whether metaphorically or topographically), or by and/or on whom you do not wish ill when you part ways. There is movement in that word, a movement to and from, which are in, by the demands of the word itself, different if not opposite directions.
There is something strange about farewells.
It is a cutting off: goodbye, we might not see each other again, we will end here.
It is, however, also a well-wishing: fare well, we might not see each other again, but in your future endeavors, I wish you good happenings.
It is a schizophrenic word and concept, for in its very utterance there is a different topography instituted, one of possibilities of future happenings without you, but simultaneously an evocation of a spirit of a withness that accompanies every wish in the very act of severing this withness.
It is as such a bastard of a word, one which by all rights should have no rights at all to a future, good- or ill-wished. By all demands it should be a death, but it is stubborn in its persistence, in its non-death: fare well, I will not be with you, but let no harm befall you while I stay gone.
In other words, a farewell always already overreaches every time it is said. It cannot help but to.
As such it shares in this overreach the same nature of a promise. A promise is always a promise made with forever in mind, in exactly the opposite manner a farewell has forever in mind. I will stay gone, but fare well, in this time that I am gone. I will end this here, but you should not end. Promise me that you will not end here, because I in turn promise that I will not end here.
Because it speaks of an end to a relation, it is a death. But because it wishes (because it cannot help but wish) then it overreaches itself and says: you better stay alive, even when I am not here. Or because I am not here.
It is a strange word full of contradictory hermeneutic co-habitations, one that, by all that is right, should not be said in order for it to be truly a goodbye, but must be said, in order for it to fare at all.
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