I certainly do remember my provincial joy and my triumphant gestures that invariably accompanied my arguments about the need to cross over into Literature. The arguments, that is, the same argument repeated while it lasted, abounded in simplicity: philosophy binds you to a code that ultimately prevents you from telling the whole story. Your fear, for example, vanishes from a text critical of the Party. Without that fear your text is pale. Thus, I claimed, the need for a new medium that could transmit the residuum, the constituent fear. And that was all. Literally. The lack of insight made my discovery quite valuable for a short while. It suggested a new freedom. That freedom soon exhausted itself in my gestures, which were no doubt useful externally, since they reflected my enthusiasm from an occasional listener, but they also substituted internally for all that was lacking conceptually. Encouraged by my own rhetoric I made my first attempts at crossing. And then, not so suddenly, it became clear that Literature, the new world, was utterly foreign to me. It remained foreign. I did not want to learn, because I felt that learning would only paralyze my writing in some mysterious way. The very thought of craftsmanship repulsed me. The residuum would be lost again if I tried to manufacture my texts. I thus confronted a void of previously unknown dimensions. The space that separates my short pieces, so innocent on paper, is simply terrifying. What appears as a space between two pieces is actually nothing but terror. Every single time I bridge this space, physically at least, I confront it with such unexpected speed, that the risk of crashing for good is ever greater. My provincial boasting cannot possibly be redeemed, though. I must live through it. I have no choice but to condemn myself to my own invention. Every other device, however subtle, would only make me brittle, resentful, mature. Such inventions must be tested one by one. Otherwise one is most likely to be lost among them. The horror.