One of the most exciting (to me) contemporary writers, Karl Ove Knausgård, writes about Emmanuel Carrère that he is the most exciting one among the contemporary writers. As one might guess, Knausgård’s excitement is linked to the autobiographical-auto-psychoanalytic, quasi-documentary character of this prose. Carrère writes about all sorts of things, for example his skirmishes with different varieties of deep faith and even deeper lack of faith. He sets each sentence in his own experience that he recalls and describes, becoming a hostage – and, in a sense, a victim – of his own writing. Perhaps his writing is redemptive, at times, but it is my feeling that not always. It is indeed startling at times. Desperate self-exposure that arouses admiration (mine, at least). A mirror that is not so much carried along to reflects this and that, but one that it is standing there, all the time, directly in front of the author’s mug, and of the reader’s.

Apparently, December 12 is the Day of Neutrality. A nice idea. But in the end, every engagement is a fight each person fights with themselves, for themselves. What might neutrality mean in such context, hard to say. But something it might, perhaps.

I’m not sure if the sad, emaciated figures, looking knowingly and questioningly, that I pass by on the street are real or just my own reflections. Although it is one and the same thing.

Tonight Tomasz Konieczny sent me the first mix of the songs to Baczyński’s lyrics, recorded just a moment ago. Just in time – I finished the orchestration of the Look, I started the Christmas Eve, and I think I’m going to have to hit reverse, go back a bit and throw some of it out. The orchestra carried me off in the wrong direction. I hesitate a little between clarity and vagueness. But above all, it was too loud and too heavy. Aback.

(transl. Magdalena Małek-Andrzejowska)