The Work

I want to write about everything and nothing. To find a way of writing about it. The whole futility. Because if I write of it and think about it in the right way …

Then what?

Then I won’t be lost. Even if I am lost in the world, I won’t be lost in the book … It’s like being a Marcus Aurelius of the everyday. Do you remember his book, On Happiness? It wasn’t really book. It was notes to himself. To remind himself … of what was important. He was emperor of Rome, fighting the Gothic tribes along the Danube. He hadn’t been home for years. He was sick of war. And he was writing. Notes to himself. Tell himself what he should do. How he should behave.

And is that what you’re going to do?

I want to find … The way of out the labyrinth. Which is, in fact, writing bout the labyrinth. I want to write about what I want to escape. Until writing itself is the escape.

 

I want to discover … a way of dying. A way of living dying. 

Everything is about dying for you.

I always though that I’d died when I finished The Work.

What, like, kill yourself?

Which was bad faith, because I knew I’d never finish it. Die in order to write, write in order to die, right?

Who said that?

Kafka. But it’s not a literal death, is it? It’s more like some ego-death thing …

 

What do you do what you write something down – save it?

You lose it again. But in a different way.

I thought writing would be a way of keeping things … memories?

Writing’s got it own agenda. Soon, you aren’t writing about anything but writing.

Sounds rather tedious.

 

Maybe I’ll write about you and I.

Would you? And lift our story into immortality!

Don’t be sarcastic.

Like Romeo and Juliet. Like … Abelard and … thingy.

Heloise.

They’re adapting that for Netflix.

Can’t wait.