"How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust were all was lost, including guardian thought? In the mortal intensity, the fleeing silence of the countless cry...

...Silence is perhaps a word, a paradoxical word, the silence of the word silence, yet surely we feel that it is linked to the cry, the voiceless cry, which breaks with all utterances, which is addressed to no one and which no one receives, the cry that lapses and decries. Like writing (and in the same way that the quick of life has already exceeded life) the cry tends to exceed all language, even if it lends itself to recuperation as language effect. It is both sudden and patient; it has the suddenness of the interminable torment which is always over already. The patience of the cry: it does not simply come to a halt, reduced to nonsense, yet it does remain outside of sense-- a meaning infinitely suspended, decried, decipherable, indecipherable." 

 - Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980)

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“Ha! To forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts?" 

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos (1944)


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