Event-structures are staggered. This doesn't mean there is no event, or that the event doesn't matter, but rather that to understand it we have to see it as played out over time, in a series of repetitions and reiterations and mediations. Notice the implicit importance of witnessing in this passage:
Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-pace, to the old ineradicable rhythm…
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 1936
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