A scholar: I settle in my work, but the work is unaware of it. The more I care about what I write, the more I cut myself off from the sources of my writing. The more sincere I want to be, the more the faster I must let the words take over: I cannot refuse to let them exist without me.
And yet I am the origin of their existence. I am, therefore, the man who conceived the verbal being which will have a fate of its own on which, in turn, my fate as a writer depends.A scholar: I write and right away I become the word which escapes me and thanks to which I am, the word which leads to other words and asserts itself as such. I am multiplied in my sentence as a tree unfolds in its branches.
A scholar: When a writer bends over his work he believes, or rather makes us believe, that his face is the one his words reflect. He is lying. He is lying as God be if He claimed to have created man in His image; because which then would be His image?
— Jabés, The Book of Questions (trans. R. Waldrop)
Notes from a Room 