ALT ... rain and rain, without stop yesterday, and just now it's beginning anew. Looking straight ahead, you'd think: it's going to snow. But last night I was awakened by the presence of moonlight in a corner above my rows of books; a spot that did not shine but covered a place on the wall like a patch of aluminum. And the room was full of cold night all the way into the corners; one could tell, lying in bed, that it was also under the wardrobe, under the chest of drawers and around the objects without any space in between, all around the brass chandeliers, which looked very cold. But the morning was bright. A broad east wind invading us with a developed front, because he finds the city so spacious. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne; tr. Joel Agee

ALT [presumably mid-July 1924] Dear Herr Doktor: I'm returning the book to you with thanks, please forgive me for not looking you up. I hardly think I could talk about Franz right now, and I'm sure you won't want to speak with me about him at this time either. With your permission, I'll let you know before I come to Prague in September. Please remember me kindly and please convey my best wishes to your wife, whom I once probably wronged without intending to. When you have the opportunity, please make sure my letters which belonged to Franz are burned; I trust you will do so, although of course this is nothing important. His manuscripts and diaries (not at all intended for me, since they were written before he knew me, about fifteen large notebooks) are here with me and, should you need them, are at your disposal. This is as he wished; he asked me not to show them to anyone but you and then only after he died. Perhaps you already know them in part.

ALT The Ninth Elegy; translated by Stephen Mitchell

ALT What I write, whatever it may be, liberates and captures at the same time. Sometimes I write under a terrible compulsion, like it or not, bowed by such obedience I start to suspect that what I'm doing so compulsively serves some devious purpose, I work blindly perhaps so as never to be free to write that book, which one, the one I am destined, by whom, not to write. Do I write? Is this writing this forever being on the lookout? Bent over the ground that I scratch dig scrape every morning at the first streaks of light, passing from the darkness of night to the night of day, I dontwrite. I sow, I dig holes, I follow blindly but guided drawn led by voices without sound that I hear breathing the world at me sentence by sentence.

ALT Always there's this urgent need to get out of my house my room my bed myself because of the eruption of dozens of strangers into my room my bed, this expulsion out of my own limits, my own walls, these impostures that push me out of myself and make a mockery of my idea of being at home and right away the door opens, it's always my mother or maybe the thought of my beloved who comes to the edge of the bed, rise and follow me I rise and we go down under the ground together there right away on the threshold always suddenly an empty subterranean passage a vast desert, a station without trains or a labyrinth with tiled walls. I follow you, I follow your idea, where are we going I say,

ALT The phrase 'Paradox Lust' is an allusive play on Milton's verse epic Paradise Lost and lust (jouis-sance). Through this slippage Paradise Lust thus mixes the pleasure of the Paradox, and the pleasure found in the lost paradise, the paradox that insinuates itself into the exchange between loss and pleasure [jouir]. [НС]