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Beautiful hours, profound words which I would like to belong to, but which would, themselves, also like to belong to me, words empty and without connection. I can't question them and they can't answer me. They only remain close to me, as I remain close to them. That is our dialogue. They stand motionless, as though erect in these rooms; at night, they are the concealment of the night; in the day, they have the transparency of the day. Everywhere I go, they are there.
What do they want? We're not familiar to one another, we don't know one another. Words from the empty depth, who has summoned you? Why have you become manifest to me? Why am I occupied with you? I shouldn't occupy myself with you, you shouldn't occupy yourselves with me, I must go farther, I won't unite you to hope or to the life of a breath.
I don't know that they press on me, but I sense it. I see a sign of it in the immobility which, even when they seem to wander, even when I leave them, keeps them crowded around me in a circle whose centre I am in spite of myself. And this circle is sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, but for me the distance doesn't change, and the circle is never interrupted, the expectation is never broken, I could call myself a prisoner of that expectation if it were more real, but since it remains silent and uncertain, I am only a prisoner of the uncertainty of the expectation.
Am I their goal, what they are seeking? I will not believe it. But sometimes they stare at me with a power so restrained, a silence so reserved, that this silence points me out to myself; then I have to remain firm, I have to struggle with my refusal to believe, and the more I struggle, in general successfully, the more I see that I owe the strength that gives me this success only to them, to their proximity, to the firmness of their inattention.

[The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, Blanchot, M.]