Edmond Jabès: The Book

If there were no more earth or sky there would still be us in the naked years we keep.

You never lose the book: you lose yourself.

I have not left my apartment. What day is it? It hardly matters. I have reread the pages written after my crime. I reread my journal as well as some sheets I had kept (since when?) in the same box. Mechanically I put them in order on top of the story of my crime and of my journal. Thus I gave birth to the book which I had composed without noticing. I mean without actually thinking of it in the course of these months outside the book.

The book does not need man to come into being. It does so through him. As in our lives we are forever pushed by the hours, one after the other. A book which could have held all the words for our thoughts and gestures, but which definitely kept only those it chose to make common cause with in their order and economy.

No way, therefore, to develop certain sentences, to add others which might have turned them from the tendency toward aphorism they so often give in to. They refused, strengthened in their attitude by a lofty idea of the book within the book, as if their concision, their proud contraction housed the light which lights up the work from within.

The book had the ambition to be the book of the eyes.

Beings and things exist only in the mirrors which copy them. We are countless crystal facets where the world is reflected and drives us back to our own reflections, so that we can know ourselves only through the universe and what little it retains of us.

The knowledge we have of ourselves rests on the interpretation of an earlier interpretation which we confirm on awaking and which precedes us into death whose instant will relate our stages across the nights.

Were the eight months before my crime only months of writing? And what is the mystery of this book which I have led to its conclusion at the price of the life of an imaginary being who was my reason to live? But is it only these eight months of pain and anxiety? Was this book not conceived earlier, much earlier? In that case everything had to happen as it did for the book. In that case I have been the instrument of an inexorable fate which the words made me take on myself.

I think of the book, and Yael is no more. Did she die before she was born like the child of her first love? Then she and I never left the invisible kingdom of the dead where we got lost thinking we were going our ways, I in search of her, she in her desire for the other.

What does it matter now if she was murdered or not? Death does not have the sense we give it in death. A violent death is tied to the healthiest and worthiest act of truth. It is a dawn which all the scattered and lost shadows come to salute with a red gesture faithful to fire.

"You are a storyteller," a friend said to me one day.

How can I be when words and images always cut in and want to be heard with their own aura, when the story is built out of bits of counter-stories, and when silence lies in wait for the world?

Translated from the French by Rosemarie Waldrop