A relative silence

“Everything I could not tell you face to face, I did not keep silent out of cunning or hardness, but because speaking was impossible for me. In front of you, words withdrew from me; they lost their order and their force, and this silence was not a decision, but a state. It enclosed me.
If today I write, it is not to break this silence, but to give it a form that allows me to breathe. For silence, when it lasts too long, no longer protects: it accuses. It becomes itself a form of speech, but one that can neither be corrected nor explained.”

Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

Dear Lucian,
I began this letter with the intention of sending it to you; I am already continuing it with the suspicion that it will never reach you. There is, in what I am about to write, a freedom that would not withstand the direct light of your gaze, and perhaps that is precisely why I write it nonetheless.
Your recent letters held me longer than I would have expected. I reread them with the attention one gives to accounts that claim to inform, but which, through their very precision, end up displacing the question. You say you observe, report, let things come about. You insist on your restraint, on the prudence of your position. And yet something surfaces that I cannot reduce to mere professional vigilance.
I wonder, Lucian, whether you are telling me everything. I am not speaking of deliberately concealed facts, nor of a strategic omission I could easily understand. I am thinking of something else, more diffuse: an involvement that slips into your formulations, a discreet pleasure taken in the drift of the figures you describe with such care. You speak of Igniatius as a troubled patient, but your language at times seems to follow his movements with a closeness that exceeds observation.
I also question Don Carotte, Anatole, and Sang Chaud… this passing of the relay that you recount with an almost narrative precision. You claim to remain at a distance, yet the way you follow these metamorphoses makes me doubt it. It is as if you have already entered this whirl, not as a surprised witness, but as someone who accepts its implicit rules. This circulation of names, this instability of positions, you describe them without seeking to arrest them, as though their continuation mattered to you more than their resolution.
Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps it is I who am projecting. You know that I sometimes push interpretation too far, to the point of confusing what is observed with what troubles me. Still, I wonder whether you do not find, in this loss of center you attribute to Igniatius, an echo of your own zones of uncertainty. You have always known how to listen to the stories of others; I wonder whether this one does not speak to you in a more personal way than you are willing to admit.
I could go on. I could formulate more clearly this suspicion that takes shape and then dissolves as soon as I try to fix it. But I already feel this letter carrying me too far. I multiply hypotheses. I link clues that perhaps ask only to remain separate. I think too much, and that realization, in my case, often serves as a signal to stop.
I will therefore not send these pages. They will remain here, as the trace of a moment when your relative silence led me to fill the blanks with my own anxieties. It is possible that you have hidden nothing, except what every practitioner keeps silent out of necessity. It is also possible that this matter already exceeds the framework I strive to give it.
I close this letter without a conclusion, and with a certain relief. You will know nothing of it, and perhaps that is for the best.
F.