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around the inner courtyard of golden Ernests. Pascal, who
reproached a newcomer for not writing more sublimely,
Montaigne, who reproached a newcomer for not writing
more independently, Rousseau, who reproached a
newcomer for not writing more revolutionarily, Proust, who
reproached a newcomer for not writing his shibboleth more
like a hermit.
Early morning, they tighten the humidity. Voices carry the
nails and leave them hanging in the air, the sounds of
striking pipes and drills boring. Sometimes one of them
falls off a ladder, his scream leaves a shaft in the middle of
sentence construction. Long ago, they shaded the windows.
But a wall doesn’t grow only next to a wall, wall to wall.
Their hammers and wires, shelves and weldings, grow
through a window and into a room, tightening the drops
that fall from a pipe and the little movements of the suits in
a closet. They have tightened my left middle ear, attached
my eyelids to my cheeks, evaporated my hand with a cheap
trick. I can no longer move. Dates have fastened me. At the
same time, I am prey to an evil spell. I sense that they
drilled through to my tongue. Never again will I see the first
word nor the last subjects of the sentence, whose
conjunction I’ve become, never the tenses where there’s
this never.
As if I was scouring a book of false biographies that might
have been written by someone under the pseudonym of my
name. The skyscraper in Montparnasse casts a long shadow