“It is only out of a habit acquired from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications that a writer speaks of ‘my reader’. In reality, every reader, while reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader, enabling him to discern within himself what, without that book, he might perhaps never have seen.”
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, aime regained
Where Félix, having closed what he already considers to be a book, rises and returns to his own life, his room, a window overlooking the street, people who know nothing of Lucian, Igniatius, Child Moon, or any of the others. Is all this enough to prove to him that he has stepped outside it?
Félix’s Journal
Have I myself emerged from Lucian’s letters? When I fold them away, they are no longer before my eyes… and yet something within me, I can feel it, continues to be influenced by them.
I leave my study and notice that I walk differently. I think differently. I return to my everyday life. But if I wish to see the drawings again, or reread the letters and notebooks, I need only close my eyes. In this way, I can observe certain details in the drawings differently. I no longer even read; I hear. A word, chosen seemingly at random, suddenly stands out in a sentence I had almost forgotten and brings it back to life, so that, paradoxically, the act of reading continues in the mind long after it has physically ceased.
Why should it be any different for Lucian?
Perhaps he has carried something away without even knowing it. At the very moment I say this, the opposite thought occurs to me. Has something carried him away instead…? In the first case, it would not be an idea he could repeat, still less a lesson, but a very slight alteration in his way of looking at what happens to him. He might hesitate for a moment before recognising what surrounds him. He might pay attention to a detail he would once have failed even to notice. That detail will encounter something else. Then… someone else. By then, what we might call the book, made up of all these notebooks, journals, letters and drawings, will already have left him. I do not mean that the work contained in this book, emerging from its own absurdity, will spread through the world exactly as it is, but only that it will continue in some undefined form in which no one will be able to confine it. Something of it will remain: an image or, what do I know… A way of telling a story, in something as infinitesimal as a gaze lingering for a second before deciding what it sees.
By then, there will be no one left to say: this comes from Child Moon. And it will be precisely there that he will have most completely continued his journey. I am thus beginning to understand that, from the very beginning, I was searching for an origin when everything was speaking to me of transmission. I was looking for a destination when everything was speaking to me of passage. I wanted to know where the work began so that I could know what it was. That was foolish. I would have to learn to recognise this origin differently. In the capacity the work possesses to endure without remaining identical to itself. Its capacity to lose itself sufficiently to encounter what, at its origin, it did not yet contain.
An idea then occurs to me. I no longer quite know whether I am writing it for myself or for the person who will read it. I venture the hypothesis that a story does not end when its author writes the final word, nor when its reader closes the book, but when nothing of what has passed through it can pass on any further, can escape elsewhere. If this is true, I do not know where Igniatius’s story ends… Nor do I know where Child Moon’s story is leading me. I am no longer even certain that we should wish for it to end anywhere. I know only that, in trying to discover where he came from, I allowed him to pass through me. Now, somewhere beyond the page across which my hand is still moving, there already exists a place that I can neither see nor name. In that place, someone believes they are reading. And as I write this, an almost amusing thought occurs to me. One I would probably not have accepted a few months earlier. The thought that the person reading me at this very moment believes I am speaking about them. They would be mistaken… Or rather, I have no idea. And that is exactly how it begins.
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