Pleasure and action make the time seem short. Like our valiant Moor though with barely the determination. Indebted in an odd way to some dreadfully ponderous journeys that opened space for reading, of course more of Pascal Quignard’s brooding.

The most ravishing of Seagull Books’ Quignard publications to date must surely be The Sexual Night, whose lavish production makes up almost for my inability to track down an original copy of Quignard’s Sex and Terror, by all accounts equally striking. Quignard’s probing of being, sexuality and our origins is constructed around depictions of sexual imagery from across the ages. He questions how art is used as metaphor and artifice for the sexual night, that darkness that precedes our birth.

Quignard writes, ‘Desire is a much “blacker” thing, a much more “atrocious” thing than modern societies present it as being. The inner meaning of desire is a “ray of darkness”.’ He turns once again to myth to trace out the nature of this blackness and its essential nature. Sex, reading in its broadest sense, nature and death: the quintessence of being.

His On Wooden Tablets: Apronenia Avitia, a less necessary, odder publication from Burning Deck, not without charm; like scrabbling to brush the dust off some fragments in order to piece together the narrative of a life from shopping lists, to-do lists and diary jottings.

Otherwise this week, thinking on flowerville’s a song for staying in, and continuing to explore Jaeger’s Paideia Volume 1, this week’s chapter on Archilochus who took Homeric epic and turned it inward to express both personal and mass sentiment, and Sappho, tenth among Muses, who went further inward to describe innermost sensation with a simplicity and sensuousness that is rarely matched,