Shade-Haunted Space
by Henri Michaux
(Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is.
Certain (shades) especially, girding their loins one last time, make a desperate effort to "exist as a single unity." But they rue the day. I met one of them.
Destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderous noise.
An immense world still heard it, but it no longer existed, having become simply and solely a noise, which was to rumble on for centuries longer, but was fated to die out completely, as though it had never existed.)
[Nouvelles de l'étranger, Mercure de France, Paris, 1952, qtd. in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, pp. 216-217]
(Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is.
Certain (shades) especially, girding their loins one last time, make a desperate effort to "exist as a single unity." But they rue the day. I met one of them.
Destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderous noise.
An immense world still heard it, but it no longer existed, having become simply and solely a noise, which was to rumble on for centuries longer, but was fated to die out completely, as though it had never existed.)
[Nouvelles de l'étranger, Mercure de France, Paris, 1952, qtd. in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, pp. 216-217]
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