The need to tell your own story, to tell someone about how it is with you, the unending and ever-changing story, and then to withhold your story, as if in telling it you would be handing something over, and then to have nothing left to hand over, to withhold because you no longer have a story to tell, or worth being told, but only to tell of a withheld story precisely by not telling it. It does not exist as your story first before being told, before being edited in the telling; the story only comes to be in the act of shaping it for an ear - in French, to publish and to edit are the same word - but you imagine telling it and you imagine a hearer to try it out on, endlessly rehearsing to that imagined receptivity, that silent appreciation which seems to contribute nothing at all, because you really need to be misunderstood, be interrupted with irrelevant digressions, you can never predict all the ways in which your intentions elude another's grasp, and what they substitute for them, so that it really ought to be quite reasonable to doubt your deepest motives, after all it was only by means of the words that you were to get a fix on your own intentions, which are hard enough to know at the best of times so that sometimes its only by way of dreams, another kind of outside intervention, that you get an inkling of what you actually meant or wanted. Whether you speak or keep silent the telling is not an act of freedom or of celebration, but something driven, akin to confession, or to pleading your case. There is a judgement in the air, you don't know where it comes from, or who it is that's judging, but things matter in a certain way, whether they were right or wrong, justified or not, and it is this and not watered-down Pindarics that keep everyone talking.