Thomas The Obscure by Maurice Blanchot

is too late,' I was already taking their place. What happened then? When the guard who had stepped away returned, he saw someone who resembled no one, a faceless stranger, the very opposite of a being. And the most loving friend, the best son saw their senses altered before this alien shape and cast a look of horror on that which they loved the most, a cold, unrecognizable look as if death had taken not their friend but their feelings, and now they were the ones, they, the living, who were changing so profoundly that it might have been called a death. Even their relations among themselves were altered. If they touched one another it was with a shudder, feeling that they were experiencing contact with a stranger. Each, with reference to the other, in complete solitude, complete intimacy, each became for the other the only dead person, the only survivor. And when he who wept and he who was wept over came to blend together, became one, then there came an outburst of despair, this strangest moment of the mourning, when, in the mortuary chamber, friends and relations add to themselves the one who has left their number, feel themselves of the same substance, as respectable as he, and even consider themselves the authentic dead person, the only one worthy to impose upon their common grief And everything, then, seems simple to them. They again bestow on the dead person his familiar nature, after having brushed past him as if he were a scandalous reality. They say: 'I never understood my poor husband (my poor father) better.' They imagine they understand him, not only such as he was when living, but dead, having the same knowledge of him that a vigorous tree has of a cut branch, by the sap which still flows. Then, gradually, the living assimilate those who have disappeared completely. Pondering the dead in pondering oneself becomes the formula of appeasement. They are seen entering triumphally into existence. The cemeteries are emptied. The sepulchral absence again becomes invisible. The strange contradictions vanish. And it is in a harmonious world that everyone goes on living, immortal to the end.
    "The certainty of dying, the certainty of not dying, there is all that is left, for the crowd, of the reality of death. But those who contemplated me felt that death could also associate with existence and form this decisive word: death exists. They have developed the habit of saying about existence everything they could say of death for me and, rather than murmur, 'I am, I am not,' mix the terms together in a single happy combination and say, 'I am, while I am not,' and likewise, 'I am not, while I am,' without there being the slightest attempt to force contradictory words together, rubbing them one against the other like stones. As voices were called down upon my existence, affirming in succession, with equal passion: 'He exists for always, he does not exist for always,' that existence took on a fatal character in their eyes. It seemed that I was walking comfortably over the abysses and that, complete in myself, not half-phantom half-man, I penetrated my perfect nothingness. A sort of integral ventriloquist, wherever I cried out, that is where I was not, and also just where I was, being in every way the equivalent of silence. My word, as if composed of excessively high vibrations, first devoured silence, then the word. I spoke, I was by that act immediately placed in the center of the intrigue. I threw myself into the pure fire which consumed me at the same time it made me visible. I became transparent before my own sight. Look at men: the pure void summons their eye to call itself blind and a perpetual alibi exchanged between the night outside and the night within permits them to retain the illusion of day throughout their lives. For me, it was this very illusion which by an inexplicable act seemed to have issued from myself. I found myself with two faces, glued one to the other. I was in constant contact with two shores. With one hand