Asterisk This

If each word, each image, each story can signify its opposite — and the opposite of that as well — then we must seek the cause of that in the transcendence of death that makes it attractive, unreal, and impossible, and that deprives us of the only truly absolute ending, without depriving us of its mirage. Death dominates us, but it dominates us by its impossibility, and that means not only that we were not born … but also that we are absent from our death. … If night suddenly is cast in doubt, then there is no longer either day or night, there is only a vague, twilight glow, which is sometimes a memory of day, sometimes a longing for night, end of the sun and sun of the end. Existence is interminable, it is nothing but an indeterminacy; we do not know if we are excluded from it (which is why we search vainly in it for something solid to hold onto) or whether we are forever imprisoned in it (and so we turn desperately towards the outside). This existence is an exile in the fullest sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never stop being there.

Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka”