The reader, if he existed, would be this entity: a person, viewed from behind, hunched at a desk under a powerful lamp, mostly unmoving, with or without glasses, with or without eyes, head visible or invisible. With a ruled notebook on the desk in front of him, he fills line after line with a rapid hand, nimbly leafing through the pages until, finished at last, he rests his brow on the filled notebook; a deep sigh, saying that nothing can extinguish what has once been written. — Night fell long ago with all its blue weight, it’s summer, a late summer in a late century, the window’s ajar and moths have flown in, hurling themselves with audible clinks against the glass of the lightbulb. — All the while the reader hunches over the open book, who knows if he’s reading, he’s never turned a page, he might have fallen asleep, or he’s the still-seated shadow of the man who rose from the chair; the black and white pages shimmer through his colors. If he were the reader, he’d sit broken at the desk with hands that have slipped from its surface, with frail drooping shoulders, hair falling over his glasses. Yet from every word in the host of hieroglyphs filling the pages, a voice would seem to whisper urgently to wake the reader. — Who, if not he, insofar as he existed, would wish for the end of the night to come; it’s as though the lamp were losing power, darkness creeping in through its wires. — And the reader hunches over the book, his hand leafing, leafing through the pages. Calmly at first, waiting patiently a while between each pair of pages, then more impatient, leafing faster, faster, page after page he turns, with a pale face full of wrath and fear, with clenched fists frenziedly turning whole sheaves of pages, with his shoulders, with his lowered head, nearly wailing, he thrusts and shoves and forces aside the white pages mounting to walls, but not a word, not one letter does he find on the empty sheets. — If the reader existed, with just his eyes, no, with fire and sword, with just his mouth he’d spew all his words into the empty book. Inextinguishable, down to the sigh that crowns the work’s completion at last with liberation.