"All of me is writing to you and I feel the taste of being and the taste-of-you is as abstract as the instant. I also use my whole body when I paint and set the bodiless upon the canvas, my whole body with wrestling myself. You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body."

Such an eloquent and rousing portrayal of what writing truly is as a form of communication. I love the way she speaks of putting her "whole body..upon [her] canvas" and the idea of hearing with "your whole body"--transforming intangible communication into a visceral, metaphysical image.

As a writer myself, I find that this fundamental understanding of what a writer ought to be, or should be, doing so interesting:

"It's because now I feel the need for words--and what I'm writing is new to me because until now my true word has never been touched. The word is my fourth dimension."

I can see how she reckons with what it truly means to write to someone, transmuting thought into a letter or a missive, and what part of the individual (and perhaps, by extension, their consciousness, their "whole body") is lost in the transliteration. This idea is, of course, especially interesting, given the book's translated nature. For example, there are sections where the images culminate in unfamiliar ways, or where the words don't quite make sense to the average native English speaker such as myself:

"Sunday is a day of echoes--hot, dry, and everywhere buzzings of bees and wasps, cries of birds and the distance of paced hammer blows--where do the echoes of Sunday come from? I who loathe Sunday because it's hollow. I who wants the most primary thing because it's the source of generation--I who long to drink water at the source of the spring--I who am all of this, must by fate and tragic destiny only know the echoes of me, because I cannot capture the me itself."

It is places like these where, in my view, the translation really shines.