In his text, the writer sets up a house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, rearranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a storeroom, and it is hard in any case to part from leftovers. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

From Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, London: NLB, 1974 (first published in 1951), p. 87.

Addendum I (March 19, 1991)

But who is to decide whether or not the writer is allowed to live in his or her own writing? Who is there in this world besides the writer? In the end, what is the difference between the world and the writer’s home?

Addendum II (May 2, 1995)

The reader is king in my book, too, but the reader is I.

Addendum III (October 8, 2016)

The Latin expression in the title crossed my mind out of the blue, and I searched for it in my writings a moment later. Ah, what a joy it is to come across this particular quote from Adorno, which pops up no less than thrice in my magnum opus (see also “Testamentum LIV,” April 27, 1978; and “Autobiography VI,” March 31, 1981). In many ways, it is emblematic of my Residua, my house and home. Nay, my world entire. But who says the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing? This vibrant quote and the previous two addenda demonstrate amply enough that this is actually not the case. In fact, it is the other way around, for the writer cannot live anywhere else but in his own writing. As for the Latin expression in the title, which guided me in my search a short while ago, that voice calling in the desert is ever dearer to my ear. For my sins, that heartbreaking call is slowly turning into my anthem.