What matters to her is capturing this temporal expanse formed by her passage on earth during a particular era... capturing this time that passed through her, this year in which she recorded her inner being only by living it. She intuited the form of her writing based on another feeling. The feeling that overwhelms her when she encounters a fixed image of a memory—she is on a hospital bed with other children who had undergone tonsillectomy after the war, or on a bus crossing Paris in July 1968—that she melts into a dazzling whole, from which, thanks to a critical awareness, she succeeds in stripping away the elements that constitute it, one by one... clothes, actions, speech, etc. Thus, that tiny moment of the past grows larger and leads to a horizon that is simultaneously shifting and homogeneous in tone. A horizon that encompasses a year or many years. With a deep satisfaction bordering on amazement—unlike that imagery of memory does for a single person—she recalls a kind of broad, expansive collective feeling within which her consciousness, indeed her entire being, is caught. Just as she is alone in her car on the highway, stuck in the vague totality of the present world.