Igniatius reveals himself

 

“The letters are in fact ghosts. One writes to ghosts, one receives ghosts. The written kiss never reaches its destination; it is the ghosts who drink it along the way. It is thanks to this abundance of ghosts that human beings invented the telephone. Spirits will not die, but human beings will. Writing letters is stripping oneself naked before ghosts, a thing for which they have an insatiable appetite. Written kisses, written thoughts, they suck them up on the road; what one wished to keep for oneself dissolves, and what arrives is no longer truly ours. Thus correspondence disturbs the soul; it deprives you of the possibility of being fully where you are, and places you in a state of continuous waiting, where one no longer truly lives, where one is no longer certain of what is acting within us.”

 

Franz Kafka, Letter to Milena, 1920 (Correspondence)

 

 

 

Dear Lucian,

 

I am writing to you without knowing exactly what I am trying to preserve through this letter, except perhaps the very possibility of continuing to recognize myself in what I write. Something has changed, not abruptly, but with that insidious slowness that renders every certainty suspect. I am no longer certain that I am merely playing, and this uncertainty worries me more than a more definite loss would have.

For a long time I believed myself to be an author in the most ordinary sense of the word. I invented figures, made them speak, move, respond to one another. I thought I held them at a distance, as one observes a mechanism whose spring one understands. Today I discover that this distance was only a somewhat artificial convenience. These characters are not foreign to me. They did not come to me from outside. They arose from a place I had never taken the trouble to examine.

I know, intellectually, what this means. I could tell you, with the appropriate words, that Don Carotte, Sang Chaud, Anatole are nothing but parts of myself. This formulation reassures me cheaply. It gives the illusion of mastered knowledge. But this knowledge does not reach me where it should. My body, for its part, knows nothing of it. It continues to act as if these figures had their own autonomy, as if I could encounter them without recognizing them.

 

Igniatius