" Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such a case, it is not even a bad photograph. And truth refuses (like a child or a woman who does not love us), facing the lens of the writing while we crouch under the black cloth, to keep still and look amiable. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help. Who could count the alarm signals with which the inner world of the true writer is equipped? And to 'write' is nothing other than to set them jangling. Then the sweet odalisque rises with a start, snatches whatever first comes to hand in the
mêlée of her boudoir, our cranium, wraps it around her and flees us, almost unrecognizable, to other other people. But how well-constituted she must be, how healthily built, to step in such manner among them, contorted, rattled, and yet victorious, captivating. "
Walter Benjamin One Way Street (Verso Edition) (1997) p.95
