I entered Reverdy’s home
without knowing the poet,
without knowing the architect,
without knowing the mason;
but I discovered his house
on my journey,
after a crossroads, on a mountain path
not much wider than one’s steps.
It seemed, from inside, to be very small
like familiar words:
a house for one man’s gestures and sleep;
but, like the memory of the world, it is astonishing,
with its embedded mirrors
and the silence between its doors,
with its stones from the different ages of thought
and its shining star, the night.
Edmond Jabès
August 1960
(pg. 148, Mercure de France No. 1181 January 1962)