Notes from a Room

Do I write or am I written? I write and I’m split in half – writing writes me and I’m one. Writing goes on and I’m lost.

— Frenet, Journal

This journal doesn’t exist. It splits into a hundred pieces as soon as I start writing it.

— Frenet, Journal

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.

— Frenet, Journal

I read to encounter people who take life as seriously as I was meant to, whose very lives are at stake in their writing. But I hardly read, life gets in the way.

— Frenet, Journal

To encounter someone in the close distance or distant closeness that art creates is easy, but to stay with them in it is almost impossible. Life gets in the way.

— Frenet, Journal

Every word I utter to another is a call into a cave, and its echo is an ethical demand. It says: who are you that you can say this and mean it? It says: who are you that you think you can you help me?

Frenet, Journal

This journal is impossible. To use writing, the very thing that distances us from life as a tool to bring life close, to get life back, is a ridiculous enterprise.

— Frenet, Journal

The struggle is this: to allow all that’s said to enter into you as into a graveyard, to believe nothing, not even your disbelief, to seek no answer, accept no answer…

More and more the fragment, the fragment of the fragment, the swallowing and giving darkness.

— Frenet, Journal