He sits down at his desk and begins to think about it But thinking about it does not fathom it or keep it in place Thinking about it as he sits there unmoors it and puts it in motion So that now as the thinking about it turns into words and these words into sentences the it begins to change, slip away So that even this slight and habitual pleasure of putting together words into structures is poisoned by his growing realization of a deep missingness underneath and behind these structures So that the more he writes about the world the less there is of it left to write about So that writing disappears the world So that even outdoors is indoors So that thinking about this suffocation into a structure of words to dwell in as a way of temporarily easing this suffocation kicks in an inescapable cycle So that every fresh insight his feverish thinking about it procures arrives stale, empty and malodorous So that was that what he felt or was that a fabrication of what was once reported about an approximate or parallel sensation So that if only he could scratch the dirt to cover the disgrace of thinking about it, but the disgrace is not out there in the yard or buried in his heart Rather, he is buried in it He is inside a secret that is slipping away. It is his home It has windows out of which he looks Joe Eliott I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors.... They were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about the pit, its memories and secrets as well as what it contained, like instinctive animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace. One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered that the pit had been covered over. It was then that I understood with horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this dark well the air shaft. Orhan Pamuk from The Black Book         Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book (A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York 1996) is translated by Güneli Gün.