Read Kaddish for an Unborn Child for Free Online Page A

one usually takes to mean what one least understands, which is to say oneself, this treacherous, this unknown, this perpetually countervailing factor that in this form, strange and estranged, as it were bowing in disgust before its power, one nevertheless finds simplest to call one’s fate. And if I wish to see my life as more than just a series of arbitrary accidents succeeding the arbitrary accident of my birth, which would be—how shall I put it?—a rather unworthy view of life after all, but rather as a series of recognitions in which my pride, at least my pride, can find gratification, then the question that assumed an outline in Dr. Obláth’s presence, I might even say with Dr. Obláth’s assistance—
my existence viewed as the potentiality of your
being
—now, in the light of that series of recognitions and in the shadow of the onward march of time, was altered, once and for all, in the following manner:
your non-existence
viewed as the necessary and radical liquidation of my own
existence.
Because this is the only way in which everything that happened, everything that I did and that was done to me, has any meaning, only this way does my meaningless life have any meaning, including my continuing what I started, to live and write, it doesn’t matter which, both together, for my ballpoint pen is my spade, and if I look ahead, it is solely to look backwards, if I stare at a sheet of paper, I see solely into the past:
and she traversed a greenish-blue carpet as if making
her way on the sea
since she wished to speak with me because she knew that I am who I am, B., writer and literary translator, a “piece” of whose she had read that she
absolutely
had to talk to me about, she said, and talk about it we did until we talked ourselves into bed—God help us!— and we talked afterwards, and meanwhile too, non-stop. Yes, and I recall she started by asking if I was serious about what I had said in the heat of the discussion that had taken place beforehand; but I don’t know what I said, I said, as I really did not know, I had said so many things, and I had been just on the point of departing unnoticed (“à l’anglaise,” as they say) because I had been irritated and bored by the foregoing discussion, during which I had said what was said, driven by my habitual and loathsome compulsion to speak, a compulsion that assails me chiefly at times when I would prefer to stay silent, on which occasions the compulsion is nothing other than a vocal silence, a verbalized silence, if I may be allowed to overstate the modest paradox: so remind me, I asked, and she, in a choking, husky voice, sketched out a few purchase points, almost severely, aggressively and altogether with a sense of dark, tense excitement—a sexual charge transposed or sublimated into the intellectual realm, or purely and simply disguised by the intellectual realm, I mused lazily and with that unerring sense of certainty with which one is regularly in error, with that resolute blindness whereby one never recognizes continuity in the momentary, consistency in the accidental or a collision in an encounter from which at least one of the parties is bound to emerge as a limping wreck, a sexual charge, I mused naturally and shamelessly, in the way that we all transpose or sublimate or purely and simply disguise our own sexual charge. Yes, and especially now that in my dark, unfathomable night I see rather than hear that social discourse, I see the gloomy faces around me, but only as so many theatrical masks bearing their various roles, those of the weeper and the joker, the wolf and the lamb, the monkey, the bear, the crocodile, and this whole menagerie was murmuring quietly in some huge ultimate swamp where the protagonists, as in one of Aesop’s horror fables, were still drawing the final lesson, and someone came up with the melancholy idea that everyone should say
where
he had been
, at which the