A writer’s work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan’s and Mercury’s, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.
What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?
Readers are my vampires.
Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same.
I felt in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world.
Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.
Cosimo sat in the ash tree every day, gazing at the meadow as if he could read in it something that had long been consuming him inside: the very idea of distance, of the gap that can’t be bridged, of the wait that can last longer than life.
I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.
Forgive me if I have a kind of allergic reaction to all words that hint of nationalism...
The horses start tugging, one this way, one that; the wheels are drawn to such a divergence that they seem perpendicular to the road, a sign that the chariot has stopped. Or else, if it is moving, it might as well remain still, as happens to many people before whom the ramps of the most smooth and speedy roads open.
Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world?
Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” “Today it is windy”?
The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.
The city outside there has no name yet, we don’t know if it will remain outside the novel or whether the whole story will be contained within its inky blackness. I know only that this first chapter is taking a while to break free of the station and the bar: it is not wise for me to move away from here where they might still come looking for me, or for me to be seen by other people with this burdensome suitcase.
At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.
Decide for yourself. Everybody reacts in a different way.
At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.
All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.
The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.
The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.