...this insignificant interval between death and dying.
One cannot accept or refuse, O death, emptiness, air, sun.
The "I" is the miracle of the "You."
"This follows from a certain logic," he said: "the 'I' to designate the 'You,' the 'You' to justify the 'I,' and 'He' for disappearing."
There is no present. There is a past haunted by the future and a future tormented by the past.
The present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time brimming with life.
(Now that all is silent within me, will I, who have
hardly known how to talk to myself, still be able to
speak? I almost cannot hear myself any more. On this
'almost' I shall rest my words or, rather, what stub-
bornly still wants to be words—though they be deaf
to the call of the world—an take entire charge of
them. Expressing nothing, they will express me all the
For pain, forgetting is an island of flowers.
Sweet smell of emptiness.
Fabulous a wing
unfolding in the paltry field of things.
Night finds no consolation in night, but in the lavish star bespangled with all its lights.
Others: a fiction.
Edmond Jabès. "Pre-Dialogue, II" from From the Book to the Book © 1991 and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 1991)