You can’t talk about night if it’s still dark. This cannot be done. You have to let her go (in the night) to see her back walking in the street and – then yes – (to) write to her. I don’t know who said it, but they were right. This cannot be done. Perhaps it was Rousseau who also affirmed that a certain distance was necessary to write: “If I want to describe spring, I must be in winter”. Distance is the requirement to foster understanding: in the face of tragedy, in the face of love, in the face of grief or sorrow.
Annie Ernaux asserted, for example, that writing about distance was a way of objectifying her situation: “distance with my parents during adolescence, distance between the girl I had been and the adult woman I became, distance between the world of my origin and the bourgeois and intellectual world, between the original culture and that of today, which allows me to write… The “objectivizing distance” – term used by Bourdieu -“.
