“LET US NOT desert one another,” Jane Austen urged that anonymous group, her fellow novelists. “We are an injured body.”

In releasing myself from all those lures and vain hopes, I fully gave myself up to carelessness and to the reach of mind which always constituted my most dominant pleasure and most lasting propensity.”

Is this too much to ask: to be close enough to the other that he can hear you, but not so close that he’s biting your face off?

I REALIZED THAT there was a tyranny of identity experienced by all authors, and a second tyranny reserved for those with representational bodies. The exemplars. Exemplary: serving as a desirable model; characteristic of its kind; serving as a warning or deterrent.

“Sometimes,” she wrote, “to achieve oblivion, you have to be noticed. Then people will start leaving you alone.”

Such a mesmerizing fantasy: a book that makes itself. You simply add to it, a little bit every day.

It seemed true to writing that it should be a form of repetition, closer to a heartbeat than a craft.

I quoted Kafka: “Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.”

Isn’t all this an attempt to conceive of writing as an object? If it’s not an object, why would we speak of form? I wrote to you of Benjamin’s three stages of prose writing: the musical, the architectonic, and the textile. So first you have a song and at the end you have a piece of cloth and in between there’s something like a shelter.