1.

Every book, like every love affair, is ultimately an unforgivable disappointment because it’s someone else talking. How can anyone possibly know what I would say...and not say? That I still attempt to share a text with any other individual (as if any other individual could exist), I consider an act of cowardice linked to a nostalgia for a human communication that never existed—and that we nonetheless can’t keep hoping to make possible. Only when I stop communicating altogether, when I finally cease trying to re-invent humanity by pretending there is anyone at all outside myself to hear; when I scream, not to be heard, not to be rescued, but only to hear my own scream vanishing as it burns across an utterly desolate universe...only then will I become what I am.

2.

The simple fact is this: if I exist, no one else can.

3.

After so many years of futile effort, I’ve given up entirely trying to change anything at all about myself—it’s an utter impossibility. Instead, I carefully watch myself in action: all the behaviors and tendencies that I have which disgust me, all I detest about myself becomes so plain, so painful, that I often stop myself right in the middle of a sentence or action, feel the supercilious smile freeze and fade from my sobering face. I haven’t changed myself or my reprehensible behavior at all; but at least, in those moments of fathomless self-loathing, I’ve managed to become less of myself.

4.

There is a sense that I instigate in myself that I’m in exile for some past disgrace, for the disgrace of my entire life up to this point—and I take a great comfort in this sense of exile, in particular, the isolation, exclusion, and anonymity such a state implies, but most of all in it’s imposition of a feeling of finality, that I can exist outside all borders of human interaction from this point forward without any nagging sense that I should attempt, one last time, some form of rapprochement, some last word...