Midnight

Night is the book: the silence and inaction of a book when, after everything has been proffered, everything returns into the silence that alone speaks – that speaks from the depth of the past and is at the same time the whole future of the word. For present Midnight, that hour at which the present lacks absolutely, is also the hour in which the past touches and, without the intervention of any timely act whatever, immediately attains the future at its most extreme. And such, we have seen, is the very instant of death, which is never present, which is the celebration of the absolute future, the instant at which one might say that, in a time without present, what has been will be.

Maurice Blanchot. The Work and Death’s Space.

Louis Henderson. Untitled. British Museum, 2011.