The attempt to catch moments of time is one of the things that interests me about writing.
One night a few weeks ago I was in bed writing something about the day. I tried to describe the room just as it was. The harder I tried to describe it the more exact it became and, consequently, the more inadequate my description. I wanted to catch the room on the paper so I could have it again later on, when it was gone and the book remained. I was aware of the power of writing to outlive its subject, but also of the gaping distance between the things I wanted to keep and the words I was using to capture them. It was like making a net with holes too loose.
Then I noticed the words were jealous of the book they were in. The book was real, and it pressed down with real, present weight on the blanket, and the blanket touched the bed and the bed the floor and the floor the other furniture and the furniture everything else in the room I was trying to write down. Yes, the words took up space on the paper of the book, and yes, the paper pressed down on the rigid cover of the book that touched the blanket, and so on, but the words betrayed themselves. They betrayed themselves in their way of directness, which claimed to cut through the physical things in the room and intimately name them, and yet naming can never be intimate because a name is so different from a thing.
A line in biro is a thing just as a chair or a hat is a thing. But the extra quality I was giving my biro lines by shaping them into words caused them to depart from the world of things. Each time I tried to look at a biro line I just ended up reading what it spelled. It was sad for me. The words weren’t going to be able to keep the things in the room, and so the things in the room would fade.
Then I drew a biro line from my paragraph to the edge of the page and from the paper onto the blanket, and all the way across the blanket to Anton as he slept. One day he will die, but I have kept in my book a line that touched him.
