The familiarity of the world does not only result from habits acquired in this world, which take from it its roughnesses and measure the adaptation of the living being to a world it enjoys and from which it nourishes itself; familiarity and intimacy are produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things.
This gentleness is not only a conformity of nature with the needs of the separated being, which from the first enjoys them and constitutes itself as separate, as I, in that enjoyment, but is a gentleness coming from affection for that I.
The intimacy which familiarity already presupposes is an intimacy with someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human. Recollection refers to a welcome.
- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
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