“The secluded, the mysterious, this hiding away with myself and my games, that is still with me and stirs within me even to this hour, it makes itself felt every time when I get deep into my work. I was my own master, I created the world for myself. But somewhere lingered the premonition of a calling, of the calling that would at once resound, that would roll across the garden toward me. The expectation of this calling was always present somewhere and even today the calling persists, even today the fear persists that everything could suddenly come to an end.”
— Peter Weiss, Leavetaking, translated by Christopher Levenson
In this passage, Peter Weiss articulates a condition not easily unlearned: the double movement of creation and premonition. To withdraw into imaginative labour is to create a private world, but always under the latent expectation that this withdrawal might be ruptured, called away. The pressure of a calling, unnamed and ambiguous, gives shape to the solitude even as it threatens it. Reading Weiss here is to feel how art emerges from the tension between self-formed worlds and the fear of their sudden extinction.