Theme by nostrich.
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I’ve always planned to write to someone thousands of years and miles from my own life, someone with no duties, illusions, or passions, someone capable of feeling no emotions except for what matters: the human adventure. I know how ridiculous and even grotesque such a notion seems. Still, if imagination needs excuses (which of course I don’t believe), its first justification should be the solace it provides. My words would be merely inspirations cast into the void when everything is over, unrecognizable. This person, this pure mind I think of as emerging from some ripe retreat, would be concerned with anticipation alone; patiently and scrupulously weighed, his every quality would expect a performance that was always the same though infinitely various, like a wave sustained by the same necessity though with more or less vigor and insolence.
I would begin writing him without too much preparation. I would count on time, fatigue, and habit to provide the kind of conscientious banality that might keep my sentences orderly. And then I would realize that such discipline is impossible- that the extreme limit of my consciousness, the actual site of my investigation, happens to be at my pen-point and violently resists expression: a curious delight would conquer me if there were music near.
“I find myself,” I would write, “in a strange solitude, the kind you would like, but different enough, I suppose, to leave you with a feeling of contempt. As a matter of fact (don’t laugh) it seems as if the world has disappeared, though I recall a few silhouettes, several odors, one or two landscapes, here and there the shadow of a feeling. But I cannot believe that my life (I mean whatever was least habitual for me) can still cling to what is called reality. Besides, describing the sort of person I am presumes I have reached a point of vantage- but it seems to me far from that. Exceptions can never be explained, but I am an exception; that is, I try my best to be. Nevertheless, I should like to summon up what energy and insight I have left and hurl them into the battle. What battle? The combat is a strange one when you take every blow for fear your own might fall wide!
You know, if I tried to find one word for all that still binds me to the world, I think that word would be light? Probably light means something- asks for our participation, our violence. The luminous moments I still can serve, even by contradicting them, are speaking to me now, half whispering. Isn’t this a sign that memory itself (in me at any rate) is radiant, magical? As if it were an inspired correction of life? I must look for the reasons, find out how- by what devious ways, what imperceptable movements- I have reached this somewhat too perfect domain, where everything that doesn’t matter is still shuddering… But then?
Phillipe Sollers
from A Strange Solitude
Grove Press 1959