Named Tomorrow

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“this is not a detached dissertation but an exploration of my origins, an indirect attempt at self-definition” —Octavio Paz

“An idealized scene. Space as reassurance.”

August 14th, 2008

My bed is my writing table. My floor is my desk. Right now, I am sitting on the floor, cross-legged and leaning forward onto the bed to write, glancing at the many stacks of books around me, the stacks which I am sorting through and into numerous piles: books which I need access to, books which I want access to, books which I do not need access to, books which will be perfectly fine sitting in a box in a room in a different country while I am away for the year, books which I do not by any means need but nevertheless want access to, etc. All these stacks give me an overwhelming desire to have a small house in the distance in which I may set up a regimen, eat simply, read regularly, write when I feel I must, ‘learn to be good’… I am tired of moving.

I paused just then to consider which direction I wanted to pursue: something I thought to write after reading the first few essays in Perec’s Species of Spaces, or this idyll of isolation with language (“Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?”).

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Filed under: Books, Perec, Vuillard, Writing

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