Death Remains Quiet

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As for Memoires, we know about those: deliberate and methodical reconstitutions, works of reflection, sometimes on art and science. Existence here (even if it is a private existence) is history because it is historical. It presents itself as always having been, with all the dignity and solemnity due to the monumental presence of a past over which the author himself has ceased to have any claim. The Memoires d'outre-tombe have this exemplary virtue: they rise from the grave, says M. Maurice Levaillant, and Chateaubriand, with his incomparable sense of the past, confirms this in terms one cannot smile about: "I was pressed to present parts of these Memoires during my lifetime; I prefer to speak from the bottom of my coffin; my narrative will thus be accompanied by these voices which have something sacred about them, because they come from the sepulcher." But, if the truth be told, it is not death which speaks in these Memoires, but rather existence as dead, as always having been, always also a thing of the past immobilized in a life which remains, in its grandiose manner, alien to any future and even to the future of death. - Maurice Blanchot