Thomas the Obscure Quotes

“I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order te make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort. And even when the ideal sea which he was becoming ever more intimately had in turn become the real sea, in which he was virtually drowned, he was not moved as he should have been: of course, there was something intolerable about swimming this way, aimlessly, with a body which was of no use to him beyond thinking that he was swimming, but he also experienced a sense of relief, as if he had finally discovered the key to the situation, and, as far as he was concerned, it all came down to continuing his endless journey, with an absence of organism in an absence of sea.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which was most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“It was in this situation that she penetrated as a vague shape into the existence of Thomas. Everything there appeared desolate and mournful. Deserted shores where deeper and deeper absences, abandoned by the eternally departed sea after a magnificent shipwreck, gradually decomposed. She passed through strange dead cities where, rather than petrified shapes, mummified circumstances, she found a necropolis of movements, silences, voids; she hurled herself against the extraordinary sonority of nothingness which is made of the reverse of sound, and before her spread forth wondrous falls, dreamless sleep, the fading away which buries the dead in a life of dream, the death by which every man, even the weakest spirit, becomes spirit itself.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“There were no houses, no palace, no constructions of any sort; it was rather an immense sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared. In this city, seated far from all things, sad last dream lost among the shadows, while the day faded and sobbing rose gently in the perspective of a strange horizon, Anne, like something which could not be represented, no longer a human being but simply a being, marvelously a being, among the mayflies and the falling suns, with the agonizing atoms, doomed species, wounded illnesses, ascended the course of waters where obscure origins floundered. She alas had no means of knowing where she arrived, but when the prolonged echoes of this enormous night were melting together into a dreary and vague unconsciousness, searching and wailing a wail which was like the tragic destruction of something nonliving, empty entities awoke and, like monsters constantly exchanging their absence of shape for other absences of shape and taming silence by terrible reminiscences of silence, they went out in a mysterious agony.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Mon être ne subsiste que sous un point de vue suprême qui est justement incompatible avec mon point de vue. La perspective dans laquelle je m’évanouis à mes yeux, me restaure, image complète, pour l’œil irréel auquel j’interdis toute image. Image complète par rapport à un monde sans image qui me figure dans l’absence de toute figure imaginable. Être d’un non-être dont je suis l’infime négation qu’il suscite comme sa profonde harmonie. Dans la nuit deviendrais-je l’univers?”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“By her anguish; she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become. and thus, deep within her, already sealed, already dead, the most profound passion came to be.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Mientras nadaba, se abandonaba a una especie de ensueño en el que se confundía con el mar. La embriaguez de salir de sí, de deslizarse en el vacío, de dispersarse en el pensamiento del agua, le hacía olvidar toda inquietud. E incluso cuando aquel mar ideal con el que se fundía cada vez más intimamente se convirtió a su vez en el verdadero mar en que él estaba como ahogado, no se sobresaltó todo lo que debería: había sin duda algo de insoportable en nadar así, a la aventura, con un cuerpo que le servía unicamente para pensar que nadaba; pero experimentaba también un alivio, como si por fin hubiese descubierto la clave de la situación y no tuviese más que continuar, con una ausencia de organismo en una ausencia de mar, su interminable viaje.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“L’obscurité submergeait tout, il n’y avait aucun espoir d’en traverser les ombres, mais on en atteignait la réalité dans une relation dont l’intimité était bouleversante. Sa première observation fut qu’il pouvait encore se servir de son corps, en particulier de ses yeux ; ce n’était pas qu’il vit quelque chose, mais ce qu’il regardait, à la longue le mettait en rapport avec une masse nocturne qu’il percevait vaguement comme étant lui-même et dans laquelle il baignait.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order to make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impression of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Moments mystérieux pendant lesquels, privée de tout courage et incapable de mouvement, elle semblait ne rien faire, alors qu'accomplissant un travail infini, elle ne cessait de descendre jeter par-dessus bord pensées de vivante, pensées de morte pour se creuser en elle un asile d'extrême silence.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Elle passa par d'étranges cités mortes où, au lieu de formes pétrifiées, de circonstances momifiées, elle rencontra une nécropole de mouvements, de silences, de vides ; elle se heurta à l'extraordinaire sonorité du néant qui est faite de l'envers du son et, devant elle, s'étendirent des chutes admirables, le sommeil sans rêve, l'évanouissement qui ensevelit les morts dans une vie de songe, la mort par laquelle tout homme, même l'esprit le plus faible, devient l'esprit même.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Thomas demeura à lire dans sa chambre. Il était assis, les mains jointes au-dessus de son front, les pouces appuyés contre la racine des cheveux, si absorbé qu'il ne faisait pas un mouvement lorsqu'on ouvrait la porte. Ceux qui entraient, voyant son livre toujours ouvert aux mêmes pages, pensaient qu'il feignait de lire. Il lisait. Il lisait avec une minutie et une attention insurpassables. Il était, auprès de chaque signe, dans la situation où se trouve le mâle quand la mante religieuse va le dévorer. L'un et l'autre se regardaient. Les mots, issus d'un livre qui prenait une puissance mortelle, exerçaient sur le regard qui les touchait un attrait doux et paisible. Chacun d'eux, comme un œil à demi fermé, laissait entrer le regard trop vif qu'en d'autres circonstances il n'eût pas souffert.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure