I build a book on our sacrificed lives. Could there be a life at the borders of life where we repeat once more — but for which impenetrable purpose? — our characteristic gestures, our most intimate, our most weighty words?
Could it be that writing is this other life stuck in the fens of the page? Here, any life devoted to its disconcerting duration gets bogged down.
A decoy, I tell you, the open wounds of a decoy which the meaning given to our words — and woes — keeps us and others from contemplating.
From these wounds we shall have drawn milk.
— Jabés, El, or the Last Book (trans. R. Waldrop)
Notes from a Room 