Writing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page B

wife,” says Genesis. But at the highest moments of love, if we are not completely focused, on ourselves or on a pointed projection of our heart’s desires onto our partner, we are usually directed mainly toward what is good, beautiful, attractive, and sweet in him. Not to all his complexities, all his different tones and shades—in short, not to everything that makes him “an Other” in the deepest and fullest sense of the word. But when we write about the Other, about any Other, we aspire to reach the
knowledge that encompasses the unloved parts in him as well, the parts that deter and threaten. The places where his soul is shattered and his consciousness crumbles. The bubbling cauldron of extremism and sexuality and animalism that I mentioned previously. The fount of magma, before it has hardened, and long before it has turned into words.
    Even if, almost inevitably, we “project” our soul onto the Other we are writing about, and even if we often “use” the Other to tell stories about ourselves and to understand ourselves, still the wish that I am speaking of, in its purest essence, aspires precisely in the opposite direction: to boldly cast off the shackles of my “I” and reach the core of the Other, as an Other, and to then experience the Other as one who exists to himself and for himself , as a whole world with its own validity and internal logic. It is then that we are able to catch a glimpse of—and even linger in—the place that is usually so difficult and rare to know in another. The place where we are exposed to the Other’s “core,” where dreams and nightmares, hallucinations, terrors, and yearnings are created—all the things that make us human.
    What is interesting to discover is that at those rare moments when I manage to make this wish come true and reach that “core” of the Other, it is then that I—the writer—do not have a sense of losing myself, or of being assimilated into this particular Other about whom I have written, but rather I have a more lucid perception of “the otherness of the Other,” of the differentiation of this
Other from myself. There is a sharp and mature sense of something I might call “the principle of Otherness.”
    I further believe that when we read a book that was written this way, in which the author reached that sought-after place and was able to know the Other from within him but still remain himself, we readers experience a unique sensation of spiritual elevation, of sharing a rare opportunity to touch a precious human secret, a deep existential experience. This sensation is accompanied by another, no less precious and moving, which is a true intimacy with the person about whom the story is told. It is a sense of deep, empathetic understanding of the character and his motives, even if we utterly disagree with them. At these times we catch sight of a similarity—sometimes surprising, sometimes enraging and threatening—between this character and ourselves. And thus, even if the character arouses resistance, aversion, or disgust, these reactions no longer create in us a total alienation to the character; they do not separate us from him. They prevent us from sharply, unequivocally, perhaps uncompassionately condemning the character. On the contrary: we often feel that only by some miraculous twist of fate have we been spared from becoming that detestable character ourselves, and that the possibility of being that character still exists and murmurs within us, in our genetic reservoir.
     
     
    We must not only embody the soul of the Other when we write of him but also be under his skin, inside his body,
experiencing his limitations and flaws, his beauty and ugliness. In this context, I would like to recall a little story.
    A few years ago, my book See Under: Love was published. Some weeks later, I was taking an evening bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, listening to the news hour on the radio along with the other passengers. In the “cultural