February 15

From Jabès, The Book of Questions—

To stop living in order to be the living verb—is that what you call dying for the immortality of the words of the soul?

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 would be if He claimed to have created man in His image; because which then would be His image?

You cannot pretend if you want to bear fruit.  To aspire to freedom you must first be within the law.  You could not be free except through the best in you or the most bruised.  This is the saint’s freedom.

Great melancholy took hold of man when he left God.  He felt the bitterness of being cut off from himself.

If you pull out a butterfly’s wing it will no longer fly.  It will hop, crippled, in the mud.  Thus i live out of God’s sight.

My exile has led me, syllable by syllable, to God, the most exiled of words.  And in Him i had a glimpse of the unity of Babel.

Truth takes whatever shape can help us grasp it.

Not the silence of wood, but of stone.  Not the absence of voice which memory can betray, but of the earthworm’s confession to the fat mud.

The sky of the soul is three hundred sixty-five times as large as the sky.

The word rocks me as a wet nurse the child of her milk.

Perhaps there will come a day when words will destroy words for good.  There will be a day when poetry will die.  It will be the age of the robot and the jailed word.

Poets give words a chance to live with their dreams.  They allow them souls.  Sentimentally i feel close to the persecuted word because it is of my race.  My revolt is hatching inside it.  My writings grow out of this revolt:  across the words i aim at the tyrant.

In order to prove itself, thought needs to be measured against words over which it exercises, moreover, the most arbitrary power of a despot over docile subjects.  But, like the cruel Prince, it knows that the night of tyranny is followed by the dawn of freedom.  The words will win, having (by well-planned apparent submission) carried thought to its dark apogee the better to destroy it in the morning.

Pity man in his coils, pity the writer whose books are full of Sarah’s screams and whose silence enlarges the margins which hold the vocabulary of a different life.