You ask me what I fear most. Not the loss of my power to write. Not that. Composers fear deafness, yet the greatest of them all heard his music with the drums of his nerves, the beat in the blood. My writing is a craft, like carpentry, coffin-building, making jewelry, constructing the walls. You cannot forget how it is done. You can easily see when it is done well. You can adjust, remake, rebuild what is fragile, slipshod, unstable.

You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said. My books are like a well-known and frequently visited chateau. All the corridors are completely straight and they lead form one room to another, the way out to the gardens or the courtyard clearly indicated. I write with the well-swept clarity of a ballroom floor. I write for fools. But within this limpid, exquisite lucidity, that is my signature–and which I lose hair, weight, sleep, blood, to achieve–there is a code, a hidden sequence of signs, a labyrinth, a staircase leading to the attics, and finally out onto the leads. You have followed me there. You are the reader for whom I write.

You ask me what I fear most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you. We never see one another and we never speak directly, yet through the writing our intimacy is complete. My relationship with you is intense because it is addressed every day, through all my working hours. I sit down, wrapped in my blanket, my papers incoherent on the table before me. I clear a space to write, for you, to you, against you. You are the measure of my abilities. I reach for your exactitude, your ambition, your folly. You are the tide mark on the bridge, the level to reach. You are the face who always avoids my glance, the man who is just leaving the bar. I search for you through the spirals of all my sentences. I throw out whole pages of manuscript because I cannot find you in them. I search for you in small details, in the shapes of my verbs, the quality of my phrases. When I can write no more because I am too tired, my head aches, my left arm is cramped with tension, and I am left irresolute, I get up, go out, drink, cruise the streets. Sex is a brief gesture; I fling away my body with my money and my fear. It is the sharp sensation which fills the empty space before I can go in search of you again. I repent nothing but the frustration of being unable to reach you. You are the glove that I find on the floor, the daily challenge I take up.

– Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker