WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the complexities and existential nature of writing, creativity, and the never-ending process of creation.
Edmond Jabes explores the intricate relationship between creation and oblivion in writing. He illustrates how the spaces within and around written words symbolize the ongoing journey of expression that is never truly complete. The 'white page' signifies infinite potential and the struggle of bringing thoughts to life, while recognizing that every written word is both a creation and a gesture towards what remains unwritten. This dual existence in writing echoes the transient nature of creativity, where every sentence contributes to an everlasting narrative that can never be fully realized.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a writer's workshop to inspire creative freedom.
THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure.
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
Individualism regards man - every man - as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights - and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.
Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I'd heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we'd like to think. Our bodies can not know absolute freedom but our minds can, can at least try.
And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy.
Worry implies that we don't quite trust God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what's happening in our lives.
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