A voice in the darkness. A voice that brings the darkness with it—of a particularly dense black. A black deeper than night, than the mere temporary absence of day. A curtain of black blood before the reader's eyes. The rising tide of a black voice in your soul. Word after word. Wave upon wave. The voice rising furiously within the dream. The voice racing faster than the reader's dream, than his childhood desire to find refuge, to reach solid ground. Very quickly the book fades away. It no longer plays its old tune, its childhood tune. The house in the book among the trees no longer looks out onto a blue sky, no longer offers protection. It has been swallowed up by the black voice, from the very first page, the first sentence. You are no longer a reader, a sleeper. You can't be. You are no longer a dreamer about to depart. You are trapped within yourself, between the walls of the black voice. There is no more book, there is no more reader. Only your own self, locked away in the darkness, trapped in the void. You turn the pages but it's no longer about reading. It's about something else, who knows what. Something else. You read the way you love, you start off reading the way you fall in love: full of hopefulness, full of impatience. Under the influence of desire, under the invincible error of that desire: to find sleep in a single body, to touch the silence in a single sentence. Impatience, hopefulness. But sometimes things happen. Like this voice in the dark. It defeats impatience, gives the lie to all hopefulness. Because it does not seek to console, it appeases. Because it does not seek to seduce, it ravishes. It contains its own end, its own period of mourning, its own darkness. This voice displays itself so openly that whoever hears it will in turn find himself homeless, without shelter, helpless. Delivered from himself, restored to himself. The darker the voice becomes, the easier it is to see. The more exasperated the voice grows, the easier it is to breathe. It's beyond any form of literature. It is very close to holiness. The writer is one who has a close hold on clarity, all clarity. The saint is one who has a close hold on darkness. With light, the writer makes ink. With impurity, the saint makes the greatest purity there is. The voice in the darkness is not a saint's. Of course. Nor is it altogether a writer’s. It is somewhere between the two. A thunder of dark voice between earth and sky, between the book and the angels. There is a face that goes with the voice. The face is familiar, from a photograph in the newspaper. A well-built face, with staring eyes. A face of massive, unmovable wood. The suit on the photograph is elegant, unpretentious. A tie, a white shirt. Behind the black voice there is someone respectable, conventional therefore. But the name, the tie, and the face are there to trick and deceive you. The voice goes on, from one book to the next, year after year. Never a break in the flow. Black waters beneath this moon of a voice. The pale earth beneath this wolf of a voice. Many books. Always the same. Each time, your heart surrenders to the urging of the ink, the pressure of the words. Thirty storeys of your heart collapse, the moment you read, in the sharp burst of hearing. And what does that voice say. Nothing sensible. It emerges straight from madness, from the untouchable space of madness, the clarity of all disorder, the greatest light there is, at the center of every blemish, every wound. Incurable, inexhaustible. It proclaims, it enlightens. It speaks, it cures. It collects all our cast-offs, our rubbish, our insanity. Hospital, prison, school, factory. Illness, glory, idiocy. The madness of rich and poor alike. The madness of being mad, and of not being mad. A man who is sound of mind is a madman who holds his madness in a pouch of black blood—between the brain and the skull, between his family and his job. He's a complete madman who will never know how to be cured, because he is never sick. A madman is a man who is sound of mind and who no longer has control over his madness, who is losing the waters of his madness, all of a sudden. He goes under. He lets go of something that depended on him alone: the chore of language, the comedy of work. The entire world. The madman is the one who goes backstage. The voice speaks in the darkness to those who remain on stage. There, says the voice. That's what has become of your intelligence, your springtime, your beliefs. That's what has become of your principles, your museums, your speeches. Beneath your health there is so much ruin. Beneath your couples, so much hatred. Beneath your fortune, so many murders. One might say, this is inevitable, the voice exaggerates. One might say, those writers, what are they thinking? But no. The voice does not exaggerate. It is not too loud or too strong. It is truthful, with the truthfulness of childhood, of dusk, of a time before the evil era of living in society. Such supreme anger is not bent on destruction. It seeks to live, simply to live. If the voice is pillaging everything on earth, striking down everything in your mind, it is like the child who wears down his mother's patience to make sure she is really there, her patience is inexhaustible, her love equal to any trial. To the trial of a world full of filth, of a heart full of weariness. Just once does the voice fill with light. Just once does the darkness burst into flame. The length of a sentence. Just once does this writer who aims to triumph over everything—because everything seeks to triumph over us, because we are constantly struggling against everything, because there is no way out beyond defeat or victory, total in either case, absolute in either case—yes, just once does this writer who seeks to triumph over everything admit that he has been vanquished by something much stronger than he is. A sentence, just that one time. This sentence is not in his books. You can read them over and over but you won't find it. It is in the newspaper, beneath a photograph. It lives as long as a newspaper, twenty-four hours, but it's been inside you now for seven years. It was uttered at a dinner table in an inn, to a journalist who was interviewing the writer, probably without ever having read him, amidst questions about the future of literature and the exchange rate of the dollar, about electronics and the Fathers of the Church, about everything and nothing. The writer replies methodically, demolishing every question. In the end the journalist is fed up, maybe he's hungry, it's time to head home, or he wonders what the hell he's doing there, across from an imbecile who can’t say a single pleasant or optimistic thing, or it may even be that the journalist yields to the despair of his own stupidity, let's stop there, let's finish up, one last question and I'll let you get back to work. Between the journalist and the writer there is a marble table. On the table are two wine glasses, and all the detritus of the preceding questions. The tired journalist asks one last question without really believing in it, without anticipating the answer, ready to put his pen back in one pocket, his notebook another: And if a great love, a great passion were to come along, what would you do. And the other man, his voice suddenly gone flat: but that's something you cannot prevent. But that's something you can do nothing about, absolutely nothing. Love is much bigger than we are, much bigger than everything. Then he goes silent. And the journalist is silent too. And everything grows silent around the two of them, the pulse of a sentence, an instant of rest that is no illusion, of eternity that does not lie.
Christian Bobin is the author of more than forty short works, including The Very Lowly: A Meditation on Francis of Assisi. He lives in Le Creusot, France.
Alison Anderson is the author of the novels Darwin's Wink and Hidden Latitudes. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for her translations of four short works by Christian Bobin in 2004. She lives in a small village in French-speaking Switzerland.