...of peripheries

When she came around, entirely speechless now, refusing any expression to her eyes as well as her lips, still stretched out on the ground, the silence showed her so united with silence that she embraced it furiously like another nature, whose intimacy would have overwhelmed her with disgust. It seemed as if, during this night, she had assimilated something imaginary which was a burning thorn to her and forced her to shove her own existence outside like some foul excrement. Motionless against the wall, her body had mingled with the pure void, thighs and belly united to a nothingness with neither sex nor sexual parts, hands convulsively squeezing an absence of hands, face drinking in what was neither breath nor mouth, she had transformed herself into another body whose life - supreme penury and indigence - had slowly made her become the totality of that which she could not become. There where her body was, her sleeping head, there too was body without head, head without body, body of wretchedness. Doubtless nothing had changed about her appearance, but the glance one might direct toward her which showed her to be like anyone else was utterly unimportant, and, precisely because it was impossible to identify her, it was in the perfect resemblance of her features, in the glaze of naturalness and sincerity laid down by the night, that the horror of seeing her just as she had always been, without the least change, while it was certain that she was completely changed, found its source. Forbidden spectacle. While one might have been able to bear the sight of a monster, there was no cold-bloodedness that could hold out against the impression created by this face on which, for hours, in an investigation which came to nothing, the eye sought to distinguish a sign of strangeness or bizarreness. What one saw, with its familiar naturalness, became, by the simple fact that manifestly it was not what one should have seen, an enigma which finally not only blinded the eye but made it experience toward this image an actual nausea, an expulsion of detritus of all sorts which the glance forced upon itself in trying to seize in this object something other than what it could see there. In fact, if what was entirely changed in an identical body - the sense of disgust imposed on all the senses forced to consider themselves insensitive - if the ungraspable character of the new person that had devoured the old and left her as she was, if this mystery buried in absence of mystery had not explained the silence which flowed from the sleeping girl, one would have been tempted to search out in such calm some indication of the tragedy of illusions and lies in which the body of Anne had wrapped itself. There was in fact something terribly suspicious about her mutism. That she should not speak, that in her motionlessness she should retain the discretion of someone who remains silent even in the intimacy of her dreams, all this was, finally, natural, and she was not about to betray herself, to expose herself, through this sleep piled upon sleep. But her silence did not even have the right to silence, and through this absolute state were expressed at once the unreality of Anne and the unquestionable and indemonstrable presence of this unreal Anne, from whom there emanated, by this silence, a sort of terrible humor which one became uneasily conscious of. As if there had been a crowd of intrigued and moved spectators, she turned to ridicule the possibility that one might see her, and a sense of ridicule came also from this wall against which she stretched herself out in a way one might have taken (what stupidity) for sleep, and from this room where she was, wrapped in a linen coat, and where the day was beginning to penetrate with the laughable intention of putting an end to the night by giving the password: "Life goes on." Even alone, there was around her a sad and insatiable curiosity, a dumb interrogation which, taking her as object, bore also, vaguely, on everything, so that she existed as a problem capable of producing death, not, like the sphinx, by the difficulty of the enigma but by the temptation which she offered of resolving the problem in death.

[Thomas The Obscure, Blanchot, M.]