Awaiting Oblivion

A half a year ago, I courageously bought Awaiting Oblivion by Maurice Blanchot. Without much time or mind, I put it down defeated. Hours passed holding me embittered toward my decision to buy his unreadable literature. In spite of the unfeasible text’s inaccessibility, I aspired to return the published binding of spinning sentences for another author’s work who would make me move and see with his lyrical imagery. Truth be told, my condition never inspired me to make such moves and Blanchot remained shelved, unfinished. And lucky enough for me!—Tonight I squeezed the thin book out from between two others that competed for my attention; courageous, again, for the challenge. A half-year later from the first and last day I tried to read Awaiting Oblivion, I see tonight Maurice Blanchot’s blinding brilliance.

(extracts)
Here, and on this sentence that was perhaps also meant for him, he was obliged to stop. It was practically while listening to her speak that he had written these notes. He still heard her voice as he wrote. He showed them to her. She did not want to read. She read only a few passages, which she did because he gently asked her to. “Who is speaking?” she said. “Who, then, is speaking?” She sensed an error that she could not put her finger on. “Erase whatever doesn’t seem right to you.” But she could not erase anything, either. She sadly threw down all the pages….

While he gathered together the sheets of paper—and now she was watching him through curious eyes—he could not help feeling that he was bound to her by his failure. He did not understand very well why. It was as if he had touched her across the void; he had seen her for an instant. When? A few minutes ago. He had seen who she was. That did not encourage him; it suggested rather the end of everything. Period. “All right,” he said to himself, “if you don’t want to, I give up.” He was giving up, but on an intimate note, in an utterance that, it is true, was not addressed directly to her, less still to her secret. He had been aiming for something else that was more familiar to him, that he knew and with which he seemed to have lived in joyous freedom. He was astonished to discover that it was perhaps her voice. It is the voice that was entrusted to him. What an astonishing thought! He picked up the sheets of paper and wrote, “It is her voice that is entrusted to you, not what she says. What she says, the secrets that you collect and transcribe so as to give them their due, you must lead them gently, in spite of their attempt to seduce, toward the silence that you first drew out of them.” She asked him what he had written. But it was something she must not hear, that they must not hear together.