Draft

At night – I may feel tiredness at a certain point during the night – the night brain activates, which is completely different from the day brain. Perhaps it emerges precisely through the slackening of bodily function. I paced up and down in front of my wall of books; if I approached them closely, there were many, if I stepped back a little, I noticed above all the absence of those books that were not yet there. I notice this absence because there is still a wall to be seen. I struggle to sleep through the night – after all, a dream is not guaranteed. But a night without a dream would be wasted, so the substitute, the safe substitute, has to be reading. Not the linear sequence of lines, but flying through eye-catching volumes that offer themselves through their slight protrusion, the breaking of the clean line.

He who writes, reads. One requires the other: a truism. But it’s not always the case that you write what you read. The reading process itself is a writing process, at least if you can read. What sounds like a provocation is not so outrageous, because reading creates a space of thought in the reader that was not intended by the author, of which he will never be aware, because the author will never be a reader of his book, but only of others. The author is therefore excluded from reading, even if this blockade only concerns his books. The writer opens a space of thought that he knows from reading, and then he dips his pen and draws on paper what he recognizes when reading purely without his hand. Everyone senses the danger of writing from the very first moment. Most ignore it, others allow themselves to be driven by this danger. This mortal danger will bring them to mastery.