My friend was shrieking now. Oh, what is this, what the fuck is this.

It was life, that’s what. Life going on, in spite of everything. Messy life. Unfair life. Life that must be dealt with. That I must deal with. For if I didn’t do it, who would?

PART THREE

Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different—but not until it’s been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it’s been lived.

—Inger Christensen

Chapter I

The journal I had planned to keep, a record of my friend’s last days—that never happened. I started it, but almost immediately I stopped. I did not even save the few pages I had written. I discovered that I didn’t want to make a written record after all. The reason seemed to be that I had no faith in it. From the beginning it felt like a betrayal—I don’t mean of my friend’s privacy but of the experience itself. No matter how hard I tried, the language could never be good enough, the reality of what was happening could never be precisely expressed. Even before I began I knew that whatever I might manage to describe would turn out to be, at best, somewhere to the side of the thing, while the thing itself slipped past me, like the cat you never even see escape when you open the house door. We talk glibly about finding the right words, but about the most important things, those words we never find. We put the words down as they must be put down, one after the other, but that is not life, that is not death, one word after the other, no, that is not right at all. No matter how hard we try to put the most important things into words, it is always like toe-dancing in clogs.

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there. Those writers who believe that the way they write is more important than whatever they may write about—these are the only writers I want to read anymore, the only ones who can lift me up. I can no longer read books that—

But why am I telling you all this?

Language would falsify everything. Why, then, create an inauthentic document, to be taken (mistaken) by anyone who later read it—including even myself—for the truth?