Reading is the “becoming aware of a scream.” The first word is always a word of mourning, and “the point of any pen is that of a cry”: the cry of unanswerable questions; the scream of two lovers whose words are scattered like ashes by the horrors of Auschwitz; the frightened voices of men and women separated from an absent, silent, withdrawn God; the lamentations of exiled words searching endlessly to recover a lost homeland. For Jabès, “all the shadows in the world are screams.”

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In the beginning was not the word, but death. It is the pre-text that the word strives to translate and fashion into a text. Death in the form of the void, the nothing, the desert and as an experience of absence, lack, exile, effacement, erasure, and silence takes up residence in the text. The place of the book is a place of loss. To write, Jabès observes, “is to accept, or better yet, to seek a permanent confrontation with death.” Never is writing a victory over nothingness; to the contrary, it is “an exploiting of nothingness through the word.”

Richard Stamelman, “The Graven Silence of Writing,” From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader (via heteroglossia)