Ricoeur ends his last major book with the above poem (Ricoeur [2000] 2004, 506). This poem is a dance of paradoxes, vividly conjuring up its author and his long life of philosophical labours – a life remarkable for both generous openness and tenacious continuity. In his distinctive mix of solemnity and playfulness, Ricoeur sets up a game of hide and seek in this poem – between text, author and reader, between life and death, between embodiment and disembodiment.

The overt paradoxes in this poem concatenate with silent allusions to the aporias central to earlier works. On the one hand, the poem evokes Heidegger's ideas of humanness as being-towards-death, since Ricoeur would anticipate the readers who would be reading after the irreversible punctuation point of his own bodily death. The English edition of Memory, History, Forgetting would be published just one year before his own death in 2005 at 92 years. Ricoeur dedicates the book to his wife, who died a few years before the French publication, suggesting connections between his philosophic labours and the personal work of mourning. On the other hand, this poem evokes his sustained critique of the understanding of subjectivity as being-towards-death in its ‘one-sided aspect of Heideggerian resoluteness in the face of dying’ (Ricoeur [2000] 2004, 357). Throughout his lengthy oeuvre, Ricoeur turns to ideas of humanness as being towards life, in incompletion and opacity.