I was extracting whole fistfuls of them—letters, words, phrases—from myself: I took my conceptions, printed them in my mind, illustrated them, clothed them in carefully considered bindings, and stood them neatly on the shelves, conceptions next to conceptions, phantasms next to phantasms—filling the willing emptiness, whose black wooden boards absorbed everything I gave it. One day, when a man who had come to return a book made to replace it on the shelf, I stopped him: ‘No room.’

“My visitor was a poor devil like me: he knew that the right to eccentricity was the only right of half-starved poets … He regarded me calmly, put the book on my desk, and asked if I would listen to his poem.

“When I had closed the door on him and his poem, I quickly put the book out of sight: the garish gold letters on the swollen spine were already disrupting my barely established game of conceptions.

“In the meantime I continued to work on my manuscripts. A new bundle sent to the old addresses, to my genuine surprise, did not come back: the stories were accepted and printed. As it turned out, what books made of paper and ink could not teach me, I had learned from three cubic meters of air. Now I knew what to do: I took them down, one by one, my imaginary books and phantasms filling the black emptiness of the old bookshelves, and, dipping their invisible letters in ordinary ink, turned them into manuscripts, and the manuscripts into money. And gradually—over the years—my name grew fat, I had more and more money, but my library of phantasms was drying up: I was spending the shelves’ emptiness too fast and recklessly: that emptiness, less and less charged, was turning into ordinary air.

“Now, as you can see, my shabby room has grown up into a respectably furnished apartment. Next to the old shelves, their disused emptiness freighted afresh with books, I have large glass-fronted bookcases—these here. Inertia was on my side: my name continued to fetch me fees. But I knew: sooner or later the emptiness I’d sold would have its revenge. Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen’s nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. Or a better analogy: do you know about the production of astrakhan fur? Suppliers have their own terminology: they track the patterns of the unborn lamb’s wool, wait for the necessary combination of curls, then kill the lamb—before birth: they call that “clinching the pattern.” That is exactly what we—trappers and killers—do with our conceptions.

“I, of course, was not a naïve person even then; I knew that I was turning into a professional killer of conceptions. But what could I do? Surrounded by outstretched palms, I kept flinging them fistfuls of letters. They only wanted more. Drunk from the ink, I was prepared—whatever the cost—to force more and more themes. But my exhausted imagination had no more to give. It was then that I decided to stimulate it artificially by the old proven means. I had one of the rooms in my apartment emptied … But come with me, it will be simpler if I show you.”

He rose. I followed. We passed through a succession of rooms. A threshold, another threshold, a corridor—he led me to a locked door hidden by a portiere the color of the wall. The key clicked loudly, then the light switch. I found myself in a square room: at the far end, opposite the door, was a fireplace; ranged round the fireplace were seven heavy carved armchairs; and along the dark felt-covered walls, rows of blank black bookshelves. Cast-iron fire tongs rested against the fender. That was all there was. We walked across the patternless, step-muffling carpet to the semicircle of chairs. My host motioned to me: “Sit down. You’re wondering why seven? At first there was only one armchair. I came here to commune with the emptiness of the bookshelves. I asked these black wooden caverns for a theme. Patiently, every evening, I would shut myself away with the silence and emptiness and wait.