SECOND PART Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous form of things -- We murder to dissect WORDSWORTH, "The tables turned." The Dark Room It's me. Yes, me. Should you be careful? Does my inky black overcoat, my usual solemn black ensemble not tell you enough? We're back dear reader, you and me, in the doorless, windowless dark room of the text. The page is the phantasmagorical blindfold over your eyes, this paradoxical screen behind which you expect to find me, a canvass where, thousands springing forth from your blinded eye, live the emaciated beings of your hallucinatory gaze. The sentences upon the page? That's what I've been trying to bring you from within my lair on the other side of the screen. I cannot see you; you cannot imagine me. When you entered this dark room, you entered under the impression that the usual rules of the game still hold, and that the phantoms with which the invisible author's breath populates your ritual blindness will be delightful mirages, sweet fantasies in recompense for your patience and docility in following the stimulus of signs. Cradled by echoes, taken away in the arms of creatures, sylphids, spirits, incubi, succubae which foment you as host by their arts, you hope to finally languish upon the supple divans placed here and there about the lair for your repose by some benevolent other whose presence you sense within this dark night of language, which guide you, which caressingly lead you to peripeties, arranging each stage of a voyage, of an adventure, of a quest for which you are reserved the triumph. Women, fortune, peril, power, exile, reversal, voluptuousness, recognition: all this you could be yours in the dark room. Cluck-cluck, it's me. You don't see me. You still think I'm invisible. But in the dark room into which you have penetrated and where you have become my host, you do not seem to recognise the usual furniture of yesteryear. They make an icy atmosphere. Where are the houris and hurrahs? Where are the magnificent horseback riders, the supple transports of spirit and sense? You begin to suspect that the lair without face, hidden in the night, is playing a different game within the dark room than the simple enchanters of your usual fantasies... And what if the only voluptuousness reserved for you within this dark room is that of dread? The only triumph that of terror, and the only recognition that of being born? Will you continue to ignore that the various pleasures exposed surreptitiously at the turn of the century within these dark rooms have become mortal? Listen closely and the whole surface of your skin will begin to vibrate like a bass drum at the least echo, at the smallest wave, at the tiniest turbulence which announces itself. If it goes straight to your heart, and not only to your dismal pleasure, to the most fundemental atom of your body, to the smallest sliver of your attention, will you not discover that it is of a sensibility most exquisite? Is it not known from where these bribes, these samples from an old melody, well up? Do you not recognize its lyrics? The chorus might contain the magic word, the shibboleth which will ensure your safe-conduct... Vinteuil's little phrase, that leitmotif from M whose return announces terror or reminiscence. Cause a stir with your breath! Don't think about the blood which pumps through your veins, populate the echoing silence which comes back to violently collide with your tympanies. Or better yet it is the blood of another which circulates in this night and within your own racing heart which beats against your skin, behind your chest, and in your skull? Breathless proximity. Both blind, both shadowed. Are you predator or prey? Victim or killer? Cluck-cluck: which of us two will pierce, tear out the heart of the other? You think that immobility will save you, you make yourself a statue, a stone. But maybe you have been within my power from the very start, and all I need to do is take my arms and close my hand around your throat, or plunge in my stiletto to murder you... And is this metallic clatter, this rustle so close by, the muzzle of a revolver being loaded? Or is it a ruse? This will force you toward the former: a fiery glowing muffled tongue blasts forth betraying your position in the night. You will be at my mercy, attending to your coup de grace, a coup de grace which may not come, which may come from anywhere, which you cannot even imagine hearing coming forth from within the inscrutable night, its silence rustling, smashing your tympanies before the deflagration even starts... You feel like you have been discovered. You search the wall you've back up against. You think you'll be more secure, less exposed, in a corner. Hidden there, you imagine having the necessary respite to discover me. But getting to this corner, this refuge; where would you need to go? The space of language is a trap I've set for you. What will you lean on? Dear reader, do you understand that the place you've entered and the one you just left are one and the same? You can certainly leave this narrative by effraction, slamming the book shut at once. But the dark room will not so much as vanish. In this dark room for all time, I will await you, cowardly reader, here in the very place where you blocked up the entrance. And such is the enigma inscribed upon the forehead of the chimera or golem which guards the invisible threshold: have been in this room before you entered, and you must enter once again before you leave.