A crane lowers its load in the distance. I turn down the brightness of my laptop screen. People talk and the sound pierces through my noise-cancelling headphones, deep into my being, and unsettles me continuously. Maurice Blanchot watches the sky turn into a broken pane of glass, nothing beyond it. A shiver travels down my leg, my thighs lose their musculature, and my shoes slip on the floor, continously slipping, as I place my feet one after the other. The paper towel has stuck to the dried foam on the edge of the cup, and I pull it away. It tears off towards the end and leaves a piece of paper on the cup. Vertiginous knowledge. Work, labour, and misery. The dog sleeps on her side, eyes turned away from the human ruckus, dreaming probably of the raw chicken leg it does not know has to be eaten, and instead buries among the dried leaves in the garden. All of these things weaken my fingers and I have to control them, force them to lift and push down on the keyboard.
I have been reading a little bit of Schopenhauer and Blanchot and Bataille. Once I have had the death experience, their writings have opened themselves up to me. I can now read and relate with the things they have written. And I assume, this would lead me to having a better grasp on Mallarme and Valery, when I start reading them. It is a little cruel of the world to ask people to have a death experience, or something similar to that, before they could appreciate these writers. I continue to think that people who have had this experience must have been in the writing/academia/intellectual business. It is tough to imagine this happening to someone in the technology business, for example, unless they have had to suffer a series of loses. Which is not unlikely, but it is hard to see them arrive at Blanchot otherwise.