“But I still can’t comprehend it. Why did I get up back then and, only half-awake, walk over to the bookshelves? Why did I pull out the volume with Franz Kafka’s letters, which revived the moment of my birth in me, and everything else? No, for as long as I can stand it I won’t read any more, for as long as even the shadow of a memory brushes me as I walk past the shelf with his books I won’t take out another volume, I won’t open another page. And this shadow will brush me for as long as I’m still breathing and see the books standing there. No, I won’t read any more. For as long as I’m still breathing, I won’t keep on reading. One thing or the other.”
Ilse Aichinger, Breathing as an Imposition
There is something almost unbearable in Aichinger’s refusal, not of Kafka, but of the vulnerability that reading reawakens. Her vow not to return to the books feels less like renunciation than an act of survival. The bookshelf becomes a threshold she cannot cross without risking a collapse of boundaries: the memory of reading becomes the memory of self, of birth, of everything. How many books do we pass each day knowing we cannot yet, or cannot again, bear them?
It’s a passage that exposes the underside of our archive, not what draws us to reading, but what compels us to turn away. “One thing or the other,” she writes. Breath or reading.