Thomas The Obscure by Maurice Blanchot Read Free Book Online

shape into the existence of Thomas. Everything there appeared desolate and mournful. Deserted shores where deeper and deeper absences, abandoned by the eternally departed sea after a magnificent shipwreck, gradually decomposed. She passed through strange dead cities where, rather than petrified shapes, mummified circumstances, she found a necropolis of movements, silences, voids; she hurled herself against the extraordinary sonority of nothingness which is made of the reverse of sound, and before her spread forth wondrous falls, dreamless sleep, the fading away which buries the dead in a life of dream, the death by which every man, even the weakest spirit, becomes spirit itself. In this exploration which she had undertaken so naively, believing that she might find the last word on herself, she recognized herself passionately in search of the absence of Anne, of the most absolute nothingness of Anne. She thought she understood—oh cruel illusion—that the indifference which flowed the length of Thomas like a lonely stream came from the infiltration, in regions she should never have penetrated, of the fatal absence which had succeeded in breaking all the dams, so that, wanting now to discover this naked absence, this pure negative, the equivalent of pure light and deep desire, she had, in order to reach it, to yoke herself to severe trials. For lives on end she had to polish her thought, to relieve it of all that which made of it a miserable bric-a-brac, the mirror which admires itself, the prism with its interior sun: she needed an I without its glassy solitude, without this eye so long stricken with strabism, this eye whose supreme beauty is to be as crosseyed as possible, the eye of the eye, the thought of thought. One might have thought of her as running into the sun and at every turn of the path tossing into an ever more voracious abyss an eternally poorer and more rarified Anne. One would have confused her with this very abyss where, remaining awake in the midst of sleep, her spirit free of knowing, without light, bringing nothing to think in her meeting with thought, she prepared to go out so far in front of herself that on contact with the absolute nakedness, miraculously passing beyond, she could recognize therein her pure, her very own transparency. Gently, armed only with the name Anne which must serve her to return to the surface after the dive, she let the tide of the first and crudest absences rise—absence of sound silence, absence of being death—but after this so tepid and facile nothingness which Pascal, though already terrified, inhabited, she was seized by the diamond absences, the absence of silence, the absence of death, where she could no longer find any foothold except in ineffable notions, indefinable somethings, sphinxes of unheard rumblings, vibrations which burst the ether of the most shattering sounds, and, exceeding their energy, explode the sounds themselves. And she fell among the major circles, analogous to those of Hell, passing, a ray of pure reason, by the critical moment when for a very short instant one must remain in the absurd and, having left behind that which can still be represented, indefinitely add absence to absence and to the absence of absence and to the absence of the absence of absence and, thus, with this vacuum machine, desperately create the void. At this instant the real fall begins, the one which abolishes itself, nothingness incessantly devoured by a purer nothingness. But at this limit Anne became conscious of the madness of her undertaking. Everything she had thought she had suppressed of herself, she was certain she was finding it again, entire. At this moment of supreme absorption, she recognized at the deepest point of her thought a thought, the miserable thought that she was Anne, the living, the blonde, and, oh horror, the intelligent. Images petrified her, gave birth to her, produced her. A body was bestowed on her, a body a thousand times more beautiful than