‘Then why did we not bring the book?’ asked my husband. ‘Well, it weighs just over a stone,’ I said. ‘I weighed it once on the bathroom scales.’ ‘Why did you do that?’ asked my husband. ‘Because it occurred to me one day that I knew the weight of nothing except myself and joints of meat,’ I said, ‘and I just picked that up to give me an idea of something else.’
“Every writer, every artist is acquainted with the moment at which he is cast out and apparently excluded by the work in progress. The work holds him off, the circle in which he no longer has access to himself has closed, yet he is enclosed therein because the work, unfinished, will not let him go. Strength does not fail him; this is not a moment of sterility or fatigue, unless, as may well be the case, fatigue itself is simply the form this exclusion takes. This ordeal is awesome. What the author sees is a cold immobility from which he cannot turn away, but near which he cannot linger. It is like an enclave, a preserve within space, airless and without light, where a part of himself, and, more than that, his truth, his solitary truth, suffocates in an incomprehensible separation.”
Maurice Blanchot | The Space of Literature