Hesitation

“Dear Father,
You recently asked me why I claim to be afraid of you. As usual, I did not know how to answer, partly because of that very fear, partly because the innumerable details on which this fear is based escape me, as soon as I speak, even from a partially coherent thought. If I now try to answer you in writing, it will still be in a very incomplete way, because even while writing, fear and its consequences hinder me in relation to you, and because the scope of the subject far exceeds my memory and my understanding.
For me, you were the measure of all things. The world was divided into three parts: one in which I lived, the slave, under laws invented solely for me and which, moreover, I could never fully satisfy; then the infinitely distant world in which you lived, occupied with governing, giving orders, and becoming irritated when they were not carried out; and finally a third world, that of the others, happy and free, without orders or obedience.
I lost confidence in myself very early on, and this loss gradually turned into a permanent feeling of guilt, from which I have never managed to free myself.”

Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

Félix’s notebook

Lucian sent me a drawing that he says is by Igniatius. A journey, which makes me think of a surveyor, advances silently, as if the ground beneath his step consented to it. He is almost seen from behind, yet I seem to recognize him. Beneath his bare feet, the book lies open, offered, already reached by the burn that slowly gains the margins. The pages do not fold; they burn in silence, preserving the shape of the path they still propose. There is no hesitation in his walk, only that stubborn fidelity to a line he does not see, but follows.
Around him, flames rise and illuminate. They do not quite devour. Against each leans a wave, a contained presence, a restrained force that does not seek to conquer but to hold. The world breathes within this tension, and it is within this breath that the surveyor moves forward. He fights nothing. He crosses and lets himself be crossed by what insists.
Coming and going, his shadow sometimes precedes his body, sometimes follows it. It stretches across the page, traces a sentence that immediately unravels, as if writing could not bear to be fixed. Each word appears only to disappear, each sentence fades at the very moment it seems to be fulfilled. What remains is not the text, but the gesture of writing, begun again without any promise of rest.
The staff he holds is not used to measure the world, but to verify that it still exists. It touches the page, brushes the ash, tests the fragile resistance of what burns without collapsing. The book no longer teaches; it burns itself away to let pass the one who reads it while walking.
Thus history is made, not by accumulation, but by accepted loss. Nothing is saved, and yet everything is transmitted, in this continuous movement where erasure does not abolish the trace, but makes it possible. The surveyor moves on, and as long as he moves, the world, despite fire and wave, consents to be written.

Letter from Igniatius to Lucian

Dear Lucian,
I am writing to you after a prolonged hesitation, less to seek your guidance than out of a lingering attachment to that discipline of speech you long imposed on me and which I admit I often transformed into an exercise in mastery. I will set aside what has recently altered our exchanges; that silence is still necessary to me. What draws me to you today arises from a more diffuse disturbance.
A letter from Don Carotte has reached me. You know him. The name, I recall, once amused you, yet it imposed itself with an obstinacy that had nothing to do with whim or jest. The letter sought neither to soften nor to provoke. It immediately assumed a firm, almost calm position, and it is doubtless this that disarmed me most.
Don Carotte declared himself in a state of insurrection. He did not aim at the world, nor even at the general order of things. He aimed at me, at me alone. He exposed to me that I had shaped him in order better to contain him, that his speech had served my designs before being taken back from him, and that the end I had assigned to him, relative as it was, proceeded more from my need for closure, however moderate, than from any inner necessity of his path. I recognized there an intelligence that no longer contented itself with existing, but claimed the right to judge.
My first reaction was sharp. I felt this letter as a dispossession. To be contested by a consciousness one believed to master involves a particular violence. This uprising was not noisy; it advanced with assurance, carried by a reasoning that left no immediate hold. It was this very restraint that made it hard for me to endure.
Then, imperceptibly, my disturbance shifted. I found myself rereading this letter no longer as an attack directed at my authority, but as a revelation of my own unease. Don Carotte did not ask to be corrected. He refused that his path be closed by a gesture of appeasement. He claimed the right to remain open, even to the point of radically changing his name. This demand first disconcerted me, then awakened a curiosity I believed extinguished.
I wonder, Lucian, about the part that falls to me in this insurrection. It has merely brought to light a desire I was striving to contain: that of taking up again, at a distance, what I had interrupted. Don Carotte claims to fight the enchantment of words, yet he uses them with a precision that puts me in difficulty. He rejects my authority, yet recognizes it enough to measure himself against it. This tension holds me more firmly than open submission.
I have not yet made my decision. I adopt a posture of calculated listening, while preparing the response this situation requires, and I try to reassure myself by assuming that the exchange may continue without affecting me more than it already has. You will easily guess that this displayed prudence conceals something else. I have always known that what resists exerts a singular attraction, and I am not certain I have become insensitive to it.
I ask you neither for interpretation nor for absolution. I merely wished to entrust to you what has happened to me, and to acknowledge that this insurrection, far from threatening me frontally, exerts on me a seduction whose consequences I still poorly measure. If I continue, it will not be to reduce Don Carotte to silence, but to test what he engages by calling me into question. I do not yet know whether this new lucidity will be favorable to me.
Receive, nevertheless, the assurance of a consideration that, despite tensions, has not entirely renounced you,
Igniatius