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.
Interpretation
Writing is a dynamic process that evolves through reading one's own work.
Edmond Jabes suggests that a writer is not separate from their writing but instead engages in a cyclical process of writing and reading. This interplay allows the writer to develop their thoughts and ideas, offering a new perspective each time they revisit their own work. It emphasizes that writing is not a static creation but a living dialogue that is continuously reshaped by the act of reading, reinforcing the complexity and depth of literature.
In practice
In a literary discussion about the creative process of authors.
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.
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.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.
Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.
My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
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