jbml thln 67/68 elsewhere she has said:

HOSPITALITY IS NOT THE SIMPLE JUXTAPOSITION OF DIFFERENCES WITH ONE MODEL DOMINATING ALL THE OTHERS, AND FEIGNING RESPECT FOR OTHERS WHILST REALLY BEING INDIFFERENT TOWARDS THEM. ON THE CONTRARY, HOSPITALITY IS A REAL ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND OTHER KINDS OF FREEDOM IN ORDER TO MAKE EVERY "way of being" MORE MULTIPLE, MORE COMPLEX. THE DEFINITION OF HUMANITY THAT I WAS LOOKING FOR IS PERHAPS JUST THIS PROCESS OF COMPLEXIFICATION.
So conversely, to truly listen is to understand other kinds of freedom or "I"~ness.
BUT IF INDEED THE LIGHTS NEVER DIMMED ON BROADWAY THROUGHOUT THE FINAL SOLUTION {Endlösung},
and you see in this a parallel to the current lack of significant movement toward avoiding global environmental catastrophe,
then I (ml) do not see a problem of inflection between past & future tense, but rather a typically human example from
experience to make a prediction that may well be ignored despite its value. I suppose that the banal lack of difficulty
we have in imagining such a catastrophe explains why the word "eco cide" appears in the spell-checker
of my word processor.

Similarly,
I cannot see any escape
or even comfort in the recognition that the concept of the present is essentially grammatical and not ontological
~ the prediction remains. As Emile Benveniste. Observes, the past and future are distinguished because they are separated
by the present, and the present "has only a linguistic fact as temporal reference: the coincidence of the fact described with the instance of discourse that describes it." In other words, the act of speaking designates a particular point in chronological time as the present just as it designates the speaker as "I" and the listener as "You", but the arbitrariness of "now" does not eliminate chronology or erase our understanding of how one thing leads to another. If I observe two events occurring one after the other, I can wait some time & describe both as having occurred in the past, or if I speak coincidentally with the second event I can describe the first event as having occurred in the past & the second as occurring in the present. Whatever may occur subsequent to my speaking is a future event, about which my knowledge is limited by my ability to predict the underlying dynamics that affect it. But "being" is something else, expressing the conti-nuous evolution if a consistent entity through chronological time,
even if that entity has represents an extended object
that ceases to act in a coherent manner
& disperses over large distance
(that is, it dies).

In this since Jabès is describing all possible presents, meaning all possible timed up to the present (as fixed by my writing this sentence) that could potentially have been chosen at the present moment by annunciating then
that "You are silent, I was: you speak, I am."
{See thln 21 & what follows}
~~~~~~~~~~~~~