the silence

When the words are lost, does the silence come across? You've remembered how to forget me after all. Grammars of the soul unlearnt; the wrong word in the wrong place. On a blank piece of paper write my name. No-one will understand.

Do we die of some kind of volition, even if it cannot be understood?
---James Salter.

'Is it impossible? Is the intangible in our arts and our natures, the space between our words, the things seen in between the things shown, inevitably discarded in the remaking process, and if so can it be filled up with other spaces, other visions, that satisfy or even enrich us enough so that we do not mind the loss? To look at adaptation in this broad-spectrum way, to take it beyond the realm of art into the rest of life, is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question of what is essential - in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own lives.'
---Salman Rushdie