The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

I was especially charmed by an article on Melville’s Moby-Dick, where Blanchot speaks of this impossible book, which had marked a moment of my own youth, of this written equivalent of the universe, mysteriously, as a work that presents the ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the questions it raises. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand much of what he was writing there. But it awoke in me a nostalgia for a life that I could have had: the pleasure of the free play of thought and language, rather than the ponderous rigor of the Law; I let myself be carried along happily by the meanderings of this heavy, patient thinking, which dug a way for itself through ideas the way an underground river slowly carves itself a path through the rock.