… le bonheur et l’innocence de la lecture, qui est peut-être en effet une danse avec un partenaire invisible dans un espace séparé, une danse joyeuse, éperdue, avec le «tombeau». Légèreté à qui il ne faut pas souhaiter le mouvement d’un souci plus grave, car là où la légèreté nous est donnée, la gravité ne manque pas … — Maurice Blanchot, L’espace litteraire

Via This Space, I came across the above quote by Maurice Blanchot, whose life, according to his publisher Gallimard, “was devoted entirely to literature and its peculiar silence”. Blanchot describes reading as a “joyful, frenzied dance with the grave”, a “lightness” that needs no greater sorrow, for where there’s lightness, “there’s gravity”.

I cannot quite decipher Blanchot’s paradoxical notions about the act of reading, and death never figures prominently in my reading experiences (not my own death, anyway, or at the very least not a conscious fear of death). Yet in accounts from other, more seasoned readers, the idea that the reader wrestles with death through the very act of reading crops up again and again. Unfortunately, I haven’t been taking notes along the way, being too young and too lucky to have been bothered by the spectre death. I do, however, know that once I pass away, I would very much like to have the epitaph of the young Benjamin Franklin written on my tombstone:

The body of

B. Franklin, Printer

(Like the Cover of an Old Book

Its Contents torn Out

And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding)

Lies Here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be Lost;

For it will (as he Believ’d) Appear once More

In a New and More Elegant Edition

Revised and Corrected

By the Author.

(The woodcut is from Totentanz, by Hans Holbein the Younger.)