...of the gaze

While I drank the tea - it was insipid, sweet, bitter, a sad mixture - I returned to a sort of silence (earlier, I think I had thrown myself into a conversation that was barely under control and over which still floated a grandiose satisfaction). What was in this silence? A question, probably. I couldn't get through the cup of tea. Since I was dressed, I gave up on the water and contented myself with taking a few steps toward the window: it was still snowing, a dense, serious snow, but now I hardly bothered very much about this amazing event. Yet I remained there as long as I could, my forehead at the same height as the deep masses of snow, but I couldn't get through it any more than I could the tea.
Question her? But about what? It wasn't possible that the element of uneasiness and tragic difficulty in my presence passed unnoticed. And yet, who was alluding to it? Who was helping me become aware of it? Perhaps I didn't look like a man who doesn't know what to do? I was certainly calm, and no more calm than necessary, at the level of the calm that was the natural element of the world. At length, I had this impression: I had returned to my bed (but I wasn't lying down); Judith, who was standing, continued to look out the window. I experienced a slight feeling of cold, not the overwhelming cold of a shiver, but a calm, silent cold (once again everything was plunged in a special silence). Perhaps this was because Claudia (she came in carrying some wood) stopped and looked at me in her instructive way, but I can't say it any other way: during the whole time she watched me, I understood that I was out there, in the slight, calm, and in no way disagreeable cold of the outdoors, and that I was looking at her from out there, through the transparency of the frost, in the same profound and silent way.
I will be more explicit about this right now: it was only an idea, the truth of a sensation. It would certainly have been simpler for me at that instant to be a face that belonged to the outdoors plunging into the room and looking questioningly at the people who were there, and no doubt I actually had this sensation, I really had it, but the thing is that perhaps this face was all I could grasp then and all the others could tolerate of the truth: this was why it had its chance. I ask myself this today (groping, for there is a time for seeing and a time for knowing), I ask myself why that distant and tranquil face - which I didn't see, but through whose approach a certain view approached me - presented itself, persisted as a permissible allusion to an event that didn't tolerate any allusion. In the darkness of time, it seems to me that this had been decided in me: I knew everything, and now I had perhaps forgotten everything except the terrible certainty that I knew everything. I couldn't ask questions, I don't think I had the slightest idea what a question might be, and yet it was necessary to ask questions, it was an infinitely great need. How could I have avoided this "tragic difficulty"? How could I not have done everything possible to express it and give it life? And then what was I if not the reflection of a face that didn't speak and that no one spoke to, capable of nothing more, as it rested on the endless tranquility of the outdoors, then silently questioning the world from the other side of the windowpane?
This is why I must say something else. I had returned to my bed. Judith, who was standing, looking attentively out the window, and while she was there, staring as I had done at the deep masses of snow, I myself made a discovery too, calm, passionless (everything, as I said, was plunged in a special silence): that she was looking out the window (not at me), and the proof of the intensity, the intimacy of her gaze, was the silence that nothing could disturb any more than she herself could be disturbed from her watching. And about me, can I say that I saw her? No, not completely, only from the back, her head three quarters turned away, her hair glossy and unkempt on her shoulders. It seems to me it was at this instant that Claudia, who had come in, looked at me in order to "break the spell," and it was also then that, in the slight cold of the outdoors, I in turn stared at her through the transparency of the frost and questioned her silently.

[When The Time Comes, Blanchot, M.]