Much later, a thin, stern figure stood up, shabbily dressed. As if by way of conclusion, he said: “Confessions without regret, addressed to no one, for amusement, pleasure, boredom: ever since you began to leave Montaigne’s tower, adorned with its epigraphs, ever since you went out into the world, to its coffeehouses, salons, garrets, and pantries, vegetation has covered every straight path: ibidem a dense, dark, venomous forest has grown—a forest fatal to all dreamers who have been assuaged by its vast shadow. A woodland of death, similar to that lugubrious surrounding of myrtle and cypress described by Virgil (Secreti celant calles …), grim abode of suicides, where in silence, many of those dear to us succumbed, gazing scornfully, like Dido, at prudent Aeneas, who did not mention the Ego, but had wrapped it into a safe bundle (atque inimica refugit in nemus umbriferum). What could have called you to that obscurity, apart from the attraction of a detail, of an obstinate, unspeakable singularity, around which you enjoyed wandering, into which you went, stubborn guardians, like marmots among their rough stones? Whoever was led to that life was devoted from the very beginning to the discontinuous, hostile to all aequalitas, observer (worshipper?) of sudden forces, incapable of a long breath that envelops every part. Breaths, ribbons, small specks, spores, cracks, tremulous sounds, exasperated nostalgia; little by little you have transformed yourselves into the cluttered bottom of a drawer …”

Ja’far al-Sadiq (who died in 148 A.H./765 C.E.), said: “Our cause is a secret concealed in a secret, the secret of something that remains concealed, a secret that only another secret can teach: it is a secret about a secret that is fulfilled by a secret.”

O***: We were in the glass dome of the station. Petersburg. I still have the addresses. There I’ll find the voices of the dead. Dank air of moldering parkland, odor of abandoned hothouses and roses rampant in the orangeries. And advancing toward it, the oppressive fumes of the buffet, acrid cigar smoke, the burnt brake gaskets of the wagons and the scent of the crowd. Thought: go and scatter it, tear it to pieces, so that it will be reminded of its furtive and lethal existence. O Literature, how many unfortunate functions were attributed to you, as to a fickle woman, eager for new clothes: couldn’t you, every now and then, give hospitality to that being that no longer reads philosophical texts and is still silent in algorithms? Then perhaps it might once again be said: “I threw my life at all the winds of heaven, but I kept my thought. It is little—it is all, it is nothing—it is life itself.”