Thomas The Obscure by Maurice Blanchot

mechanism had for its sole function the measurement, by a silent exploration, of the empty movement of its various parts. She went down into the garden and, there, seemed to disengage herself at least in part from the condition into which the events of the night had thrown her. The sight of the trees stunned her. Her eyes clouded over. What was striking now was the extreme weakness she showed. There was no resistance left in her organism, and with her transparent skin, the great pallor of her glances, she seemed to tremble with exhaustion whenever anyone or anything approached her. In fact one might have wondered how she could stand the contact of the air and the cries of the birds. By the way she oriented herself in the garden, one was almost sure that she was in another garden: not that she walked like a somnambulist in the midst of the images of her slumber, but she managed to proceed across the field full of life, resounding and sunlit, to a worn-out field, mournful and extinguished, which was a second version of the reality she traveled through. Just when one saw her stop, out of breath and breathing with difficulty the excessively fresh, cool air which blew against her, she was penetrating a rarified atmosphere in which, to get back her breath, it was enough to stop breathing entirely. While she was walking with difficulty along the path where she had to lift up her body with each step, she was entering, a body without knees, onto a path in every way like the first, but where she alone could go. This landscape relaxed her, and she felt the same consolation there as if, overturning from top to bottom the illusory body whose intimacy oppressed her, she might have been able to exhibit to the sun which threw light on her like a faint star, in the form of her visible chest, her folded legs, her dangling arms, the bitter disgust which was piecing together an absolutely hidden second person deep within her. In this ravaged day, she could confess the revulsion and fright whose vastness could be circumscribed by no image, and she succeeded almost joyously in forcing from her belly the inexpressible feelings (fantastic creatures having in turn the shape of her face, of her skeleton, of her entire body) which had drawn within her the entire world of repulsive and unbearable things, through the horror that world inspired in her. The solitude, for Anne, was immense. All that she saw, all that she felt was the tearing away which separated her from what she saw and what she felt. The baneful clouds, if they covered the garden, nevertheless remained invisible in the huge cloud which enveloped them. The tree, a few steps away, was the tree with reference to which she was absent and distinct from everything. In all the souls which surrounded her like so many clearings, and which she could approach as intimately as her own soul, there was a silent, closed and desolate consciousness (the only light which made them perceptible), and it was solitude that created around her the sweet field of human contacts where, among infinite relationships full of harmony and tenderness, she saw her own mortal pain coming to meet her.
     
     
     
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    W HEN THEY FOUND HER stretched out on a bench in the garden, they thought she had fainted. But she had not fainted; she was sleeping, having entered into sleep by way of a repose deeper yet than sleep. Henceforth, her advance toward unconsciousness was a solemn combat in which she refused to give in to the thrill of drowsiness until she was wounded, dead already, and defended up to the last instant her right to consciousness and her share of clear thoughts. There was no complicity between her and the night. From the time the day started to fade, listening to the mysterious hymn which called her to another existence, she prepared herself for the struggle in which she could be defeated only by the total ruin of life. Her cheeks red, her eyes shining, calm and smiling, she enthusiastically mustered her