…the passing last week of Maurice Blanchot, 95, a hi-brow French novelist and critic. I don’t include much writing-about-writing on this site, but here’s something Blanchot once wrote in that vein:

“Writing is a fearful spiritual weapon that negates the naive existence of what it names and must therefore do the same to itself. Literature runs the danger of denying its own desire for presence, although it cannot become anything else, philosophy for example. Hence writing is a self-disturbed activity: it knows itself to be, at once, trivial and apocalyptic, vain yet of the greatest consciousness-altering potential….”It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a writer sitting at their table and forming letters on a piece of paper.”