Notes from a Room

I type a few words, halfheartedly, delete half of them, smoke a cigarette, despair of my life, and if the right words come, if one right phrase comes, I’m found, or rather lost in a larger world, at least for a moment.

— Frenet, Journal

To write is to rewrite, which is to say to quibble, which is to say to lie. Thus to write is the work of the devil and to be written is the work of God. But to write is unavoidable and to write is also to be written.

— Frenet, Journal

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