Gleaming with black lacquer, dead and strange, the shelves were loath to reply. So I, a professional word tamer, went back to my inkwell. Several deadlines were approaching: I had nothing out of which to write.

“Oh, how I hated all those people slitting open the latest literary journal with their paper knives, surrounding my flogged and exhausted name with tens of thousands of eyes. I’ve just remembered a tiny incident: a street, a little boy on the frozen pavement hawking letters (R and L) for galoshes, and my immediate thought: both his letters and mine will end up underfoot.

“Yes, I felt that both I and my literature had been trampled and made meaningless; if not for ill health, a sound solution would scarcely have been found. Sudden and difficult, my illness disconnected me for a long time from writing: my unconscious was able to rest, to gain time and gather meanings. I remember that when I, still physically weak and only half connected to the world, finally opened the door of this black room, made my way to this very armchair, and once more surveyed the bookless emptiness, it began to speak—softly and indistinctly, but still, still—it agreed to speak to me again, as in those days I had thought gone forever! You realize that for me this was such a—”

His hand touched my shoulder—and jerked back.

“However, we’ve no time for lyrical effusions. They’ll be here soon. So, back to the facts. I now knew that my conceptions needed love and silence. Once profligate with my phantasms, I began hoarding them and hiding them from inquisitive eyes. I kept them all here under lock and key, and my invisible library reappeared: phantasm next to phantasm, opus next to opus, edition next to edition—they began to fill these shelves. Look here a minute—no, to the right, on the middle shelf—you don’t see anything, do you? Whereas I…”

I moved mechanically aside: a hard, concentrated joy trembled in my host’s sharp pupils.

“Yes, and then I made up my mind: to shut the inkwell lid and return to the kingdom of free, pure, and unsubstantiated conceptions. Sometimes, out of long habit, I was drawn to paper, and a few words would steal out from under my pencil: but I killed those freaks and dealt ruthlessly with my old writerly ways. Have you ever heard of the giardinetti di San Francesco—the gardens of Saint Francis?* In Italy I often visited them: the tiny flower gardens of one or two beds, three feet square, inside high solid walls, in almost all Franciscan monasteries. Now, in exchange for silver soldi and in violation of the tradition of Saint Francis, one may view them, if only through a grille, from without. In the past, even that was forbidden: flowers grew there—as Saint Francis had willed—not for others, but for themselves: they could not be picked or replanted outside the enclosure; those who had not taken vows could not set foot in the gardens, or even look at the flowers: immune from people’s touch, protected from eyes and scissors, they could bloom and be fragrant for themselves.

“Well, I decided—I hope you won’t find this strange—to plant a garden immured in silence and secrecy in which all my conceptions, all my most exquisite phantasms and monstrous inventions might, far from people’s eyes, grow and bloom for themselves. I hate the coarse rinds of heavily pendant fruits that torment and wither branches; I wanted my tiny garden to contain an eternal, non-deciduous and non-bearing composite of meanings and forms! Don’t think I am an egoist who cannot step out of his ‘I,’ a misanthrope who hates thoughts not his own. No: in the world only one thing is truly hateful to me: letters. Anyone who can and will pass through this secrecy to live and work here, by the beds of pure conceptions, I welcome as a brother.”

For a minute he fell silent and eyed the oak backs of the armchairs which, ranged around him, appeared to be listening with great attention.

“Little by little, chosen ones from the world of writers and readers began gathering here, in letterlessness. My garden of conceptions is not for everyone. We are few and shall be fewer still. Because the burden of empty shelves is onerous. And yet—”

I tried to object: “You’re confiscating letters, as you put it, not only from yourself, but from others. I would remind you of the outstretched palms.”

“Well, that … You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann*) as a wildly overgrown tree that—for two hundred years straight—had stifled the growth of all English literature; thirty years later, Börne* called Goethe: ‘A monstrous cancer spreading through the body of German literature.’ Both men were right: if our letterizations stifle one another, if writers prevent each other from writing, they don’t allow readers even to form an idea. The reader hasn’t the chance to have ideas, the right to them has been usurped by word professionals who are stronger and more experienced in this matter: libraries have crushed the reader’s imagination, the professional writings of a small coterie of scribblers have crammed shelves and heads to bursting. Lettered excesses must be destroyed: on shelves and in heads. One must clear at least a little space of other people’s conceptions to make room for one’s own: everyone has the right to a conception—both the professional and the dilettante. I’ll bring you the eighth armchair.”

Without waiting for a reply, he flashed from the room.

Left alone, I again surveyed the black step- and word-muffling sanctum with its shelves encasing emptiness. A feeling of wary bewilderment was increasing in me with every second: so an animal must feel under vivisection. “What am I to him or them? What do their conceptions need from me?” I resolved to find out.