"We need the tonic of wildness. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander."
There are days when the island, in all its austerity, ceases to be a remnant and becomes a beginning. It is no longer a place of forgetting, but of awakening. A raw laboratory where matter organizes itself, struggles, fails, and begins again. It throbs within the geological silence, a silence deeper than silence itself. A silence that breathes...
Dear Félix,
Distance is an excellent counsellor. Thus it is that my feelings toward you, if one may put it that way, have calmed. Today is almost a day of rest while the circus once again raises its poles and, behind its heavy curtains, prepares once more to reveal itself.
When the Moon Child, drawing upon Pascal Quignard, reflects on postlanguage, he means—as Quignard himself does—that postlanguage is not simply what comes after having spoken, more or less well. Rather, it is a state in which thought attempts to move beyond ordinary language without rejecting it. As though, through words, one were trying to reach something that words themselves do not entirely contain. Literature, in Quignard’s work—as the Moon Child understands perfectly well—often moves in this direction: it uses language in order to touch what precedes language.
Well, this may surprise you, Félix, but there are times when, while reading the Moon Child’s notebooks, I find myself thinking that what he writes precedes me.
In this sense, truly thinking, as I do now, so far from you, does not consist merely in arranging ideas. Truly thinking would mean drawing near to that very ancient region within us, to that primordial darkness, to that birth which is never entirely complete.
This is why he writes: “One must contemplate the void upstream of all things.”
The “void” here is not merely nothingness. It is the before. It is what existed before forms became too sharply defined, before names, before explanations. To contemplate this void is to accept looking at what, within us, has not yet been neatly arranged. It is a risky undertaking, because one loses one’s bearings there.
Hence those powerful words: “One can die for thinking...” One might also say die from thinking... or even think from dying. Yet such phrases should not be understood only in a physical sense. They mean that pursuing thought to its furthest limits can profoundly transform an existence.
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