Conversation with K. Should we think of leaving, of giving up? We earn so little and for what? It is not as if what we do is creative. It’s not as if what we do is in any way creative. His book has sold 224 copies. Mine, he thinks, something similar. If you sell 400 copies in two years, it will go into paperback. Paperback, I think to myself, that’s the last thing I want. Paperback! Then the humiliation would be complete, I think to myself, then humiliation would complete itself. Then would I be linked to every bookshop that carried the book, I think to myself, then would be bound to wherever the book appeared as by a thousand spider threads.
What have I written?, What did I write? Excuses, you come up with hundreds of them, every kind of excuse. I was writing under constraint, you tell yourself, how could I do otherwise? I had no time, you tell yourself, and no opportunities, how could I do otherwise? I had no leave of absence, no stretch of time, I had too much administration, there was too much bureaucracy, you say, I hadn’t time enough, I wasn’t educated enough, I wasn’t taught enough grammar, I wasn’t taught how to write a well formed sentence, I wrote in a rush, I wrote too quickly, I had no time for revision, the copy editor didn’t revise my book, the proof reader missed all the typos, how could I do otherwise?
Hundreds of excuses, none of them plausible. Hundreds of excuses, but you are your own victim, it’s your fault, how could it be otherwise, what else could have happened, it was your fate, it was necessity, it was known in advance, you were born to write badly, prepared to write badly, everything in your life pointed to that, every prior failure prepared you for that, you had all the signs, all the evidence and how could you have expected otherwise. You knew it was coming, you were prepared in advance, but you still hoped, hope burned in you despite everything that was done in advance to crush hope. How could you have hoped it turned out different? How could it have turned out but the way that it did? How could it have happened otherwise? You knew, you knew, your life failed in advance, it had already failed, and how could the book be anything but failure?
What hope you had, what youth, was illusion. You were old before you born, hopeless before you could hope, unfree before you dreamt of freedom. Nothing was possible for you from the first. Why did you hope? What was hope in you? Your hope means nothing, it’s absurd, it laughs at itself, hope laughs at itself in you, what hope opens it also closes, what it makes possible it makes impossible from the first. No, there was no hope, not from the first and even before the first. Before anything was possible, it was impossible. Before it began, it could not begin. Hope rotted in you. Hope laughed at itself in you, that was your youth, but then it stopped laughing. Then, trapped, hope went mad.
Didn’t you always take corruption for innocence, senscence for youth? Didn’t you take the end for the beginning, the failure for the deed? You mistook one thing for another, and your life is this mistake. Your hope is a mistake and your life is a mistake. One thing does not lead to another, one thing leads nowhere, it is always a misstep. The first step was a misstep. Faux pas from the first. False steps, wrong steps, pseudo-steps.
You thought you could step forwards, but this was denied you. You thought you could begin, that there was a place from which to begin, but this was denied you. Only the non-place from which nothing could begin. Botched, from the first. Chanceless, from the first. You would live belatedly, after the disaster. You lived after the catastrophe, not before it. The shipwreck of your life. The storm from which nothing issues. The turning of nothing in nothing. Defeat, from the first, and from before the beginning.
Why did you think you could write? Why did you think writing was possible for you? True, you surrounded yourself with books, you read, you spent days and nights reading. You wanted nothing but time to read. But as you read, you dreamt of books you would write. Why did you overstep the mark? Why did you think writing was possible for you? Why this mistake, this overreaching? Why did you suppose you could add another book to those shelves? Why did you think you could finish a book, and place it up among the others? Why did you suppose the bookshelf would make a space for your surname, for your first name, that the Library of Congress would prepare an entry for what you had written, and that your hardbacked book could be borrowed as other books might be borrowed from the British Library?
Oh, I know your secret, I know your false modesty, I know you wanted to slip a book into the library, to write your book and have it published and then to find it tucked between all the other books in the library. Yes, to have found tucked in between other books surreptitiously, as if it had always been there. As though it had grown there, as though it had sown itself, long before you appeared. As though it had materialised from the other books around it. You thought it was your due, your reward. But you thought, at the same, that it was a modest reward, that you were asking for very little. But in truth, you were asking too much. In truth, you wanted too much from the start. In truth, you were too hopeful, you always were, and you should have understood that the library is the place you cannot be even though the library stretches around you, and all you can think of are books and of writing a book. Even though the library is the wall around your whole life, and your life will have been lived in the same library.
Did you really think it was possible for you to write? Did you dream you could join others in writing? Did you really think it was possible for you to write, for you of all people, for you who never had a chance, who was never given a chance, who never could have had a chance, who could never have begun, whose was made not to begin but to fail to begin, who was made so that beginning was impossible? Still you dreamed of beginning. Still, then the dream of beginning, still you were young enough to think it would all begin, that life was around the corner, that a new life could be lived, that your life would change.
But you know that you will always be here, that the same will happen over again, and you will never add a book to the library. You know that library is like the forest which will not admit you, that it says, in advance, that your books will not be kept here, that there will be no books nor even the hope of writing them, that every step is a false step, a step untaken, a step untakeable, a step for others to take, but not for you, that this is all there is and all there will be, you surrounded by books as you were always surrounded, you for whom books were a great deal, but who also dreamed of adding your own book to those many books, to write, to have written a book, to find a book with your name on it among other books, to come across your own book as if by chance, as if you had had nothing to do with it, as if you had not written it, as if it had just appeared, as if it had grown by itself, as if it came together by chance one night in the library, born from your dreams, born from all you wanted and all your life was not, born from the nothingness of your life which in truth was never lived, born from the negation of your life, from all that it was not, made from your failures, made from what you could not do, from what was never possible for you, from what would never be possible.
Who were you to drift into into the library without identification, to come through the turnstile, unnoticed, anonymous, no doubt taken for a student among other students, who went up the stairs until he found the third floor, until he found himself by chance between the books on literature and the books on philosophy? Who were you non-student, interloper, who crept into the library in the belief he had a place there, thinking he could take his place at the desks with other readers, with a pile of books and with his notepad, writing like the others around him, those who had a reason to be there? Who were you to to copy into his notepad great chunks of the books he was reading, copying fervently not to understand these books, but to be borne by those books into his own writing, in the hope of being so carried and so transported, copying not just books, but the idea of writing, of living to write, dreaming that if such and such a book could be published, then why couldn’t he, too, write a book like that and publish a book like that?
Why not?, you thought, why can’t I do the same?, you thought, why can’t I write from my life and transform that life?, why can’t I find my way back to that place where life should have begun and live again, you thought, but what you didn’t understand was that the library was your tomb, and what began there would also end there, that it had already ended even as it began, that the library was not Ussy-sur-Marne, that it was not the room between the bedroom and the bathroom in the flat in Prague, that it was not the upstairs room in Eze-la-Village, that it was not the rue Saint-Benoit in Paris, but the opposite of all those places, that writing was not possible there but impossible, that writing ruled itself out then and there, even before it began, that writing was ruled out for you, and especially for you, that it was your destiny not to write, that what was necessary was your non-writing, that the fate allotted to you meant the impossibility of writing and nothing other than that impossibility, that the path was blocked, that the way was impossible and no way would be cleared, that you might as well give up since writing had given you up, might as well throw it all in, even as you knew that this ‘might as well’ was impossible for you and that just as you could not write, could not begin writing, it was your fate to run up against the inability to write, that in truth you were nothing other than that inability as it ran up against itself, that there was no chance, no options, and you would always run up against the same wall, again and again against the same wall, never learning, always returning, always fighting your way back, but what for, always to that same wall without a door, to that featureless wall against which you had to break your head over and again?
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