People think, almost unanimously, that what interests me is writing. But what really interests me is remembering. In some languages, the word “remember” comes from the old word for awaken, and that’s how I like to think of it. I forget whether it relates to the word for heart as well, but I hope it does. After all, remembering things sometimes means knowing them by heart.

Often people even say: “There’s a plot for one of your novels,” as if I went around in search of plots for novels and not in search of myself. If I write it’s in order to remember, to awaken my sleeping soul, to stir up my mind and discover its secret pathways. Most of my stories are fragments of my soul’s memory, not inventions.

The soul has its own way of seeing things. It contains elements of our waking lives, but also elements that are particular and personal to it; the soul is part of a higher order of universal understanding that our consciousness can’t access directly. The soul’s conception of what happens in and around us, then, is much more complete than anything the narrow, limited self could ever perceive.

Today all those different kinds of ruins came back to me, and I knew it was my soul’s way of saying, “I am those ruins.” My semi-erotic contemplation of the ruins is really a narcissistic contemplation of myself. And although it comes at a price, and despite the sadness of what’s being contemplated, it feels good. When I look at myself in the mirror and see someone I don’t like, I think: at least it’s someone I can trust. The same thing happens with this inner contemplation. It doesn’t matter if I’m looking at an ugly picture as long as it’s authentic.

Of course, I don’t know to what extent my soul is really mine. It’s more that I belong to this soul, which is not, as more than one philosopher has said, necessarily even inside me. It’s simply something I don’t know about, and the self is only a part—shaped by a certain practical awareness—of a vast ocean that transcends me and in no way belongs to me, a specimen that has emerged, or is emerging, from an immense sea of nucleic acid. But what’s behind it, and what impulse is expressing itself by means of the acid? That desire, that curiosity, that greed latent in the material particles.

I’m not interested in finding answers anymore, not in the slightest. For now the questions are enough, and maybe I don’t even need them. The discourse has taken this form today precisely because of the things I lack, because for a few moments I glimpsed those fragments of memory, of the soul’s memory, and for a few moments I remembered myself. Meanwhile the rest of my life, outside those moments, grows ever more insubstantial.

January 9

A dream bursts into the empty discourse: