#opacities

Many writers I knew claimed they would be satisfied if their books made life bearable for just one person. But you can't be sure of that. Not even if that person is you.

I wanted to send you something very small and perfect that would say everything. A single sentence. A word. A letter.

Reading under the covers with a flashlight, is that a poetics?

When she was twenty-three years old, Mieko Kanai wrote a story, but when she read it in a magazine, it seemed inconceivable to her that she had written it. And it seemed still more inconceivable to her, in the instant that she was writing, that she was writing it. She thought, Some other person is writing this. Reading her words, I traced a stain of light. All books are posthumous, I realized. All writing is ghostwriting.

Many writers I knew claimed they would be satisfied if their books made life bearable for just one person. But you can't be sure of that. Not even if that person is you.

Early December. Rilke's birthday. It was the season of Absolute Shadows, the time of closing the book, snuffing the candle, and folding one's arms to lie down on the tomb.

There...he would learn at last to write again, to hear the half-obliterated groaning of the spirits.

Marvelous generosity, duplicity, and cunning: an act with the quality of a fairy tale.