ANNIHILATE THE SELF, we wrote to one another. I don’t know how many times. Annihilate the self. It wasn’t about death, mysticism, or equilibrium, it was about reinventing oneself as a writer. Withdrawal was chrysalis. How to grow a completely different lung, for another breath.

“My work was only created by elimination,” wrote Mallarmé, “and every truth established born only of the loss of an impression which, having sparkled, burnt itself out and allowed me, thanks to the timbres it emitted, to go deeper into the sensation of the Absolute Shadows.”

SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN wrote that Hélène Cixous worked on the same subjects over and over until they became “decanted.” I loved this idea of writing as distillation, a chemical process.

“I know that I have mentioned this already,” Clarice Lispector wrote, “but I am repeating it out of my zest for happiness: I want the same thing over and over again.”

Only with fragments can you make a universe; this is what we call worldbuilding.

The series of small books suggests collage, I wrote to you. It’s always unfinished.

“SLEPT, AWOKE, slept, awoke,” wrote Kafka, “miserable life.” The thought of such an existence frightened me, and at the same time there was something vivid about its arid atmosphere, its multiplicity and spareness. To write: When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects. Often I think it over and then I

AND WHY RECORD these notes, which, by the time they are written, will have been written by someone who no longer exists? What I was writing, I thought, was simply what I wanted to keep. So as not to forget. So that, when I opened my book, I could return.

STUART HALL CALLED himself a political humanist and an intellectual anti-humanist. I thought this was perfect until I had to talk about writing in public. Then my humanism and anti-humanism became hopelessly confused, and I found myself ascribing motives to what I had written in a kind of trance. How does one present a coherent self?