Mais le coffret m’échappe. Certes, il apparaît dans un récit pas encore terminé, mais il m’échappe quand même. Un de ces objets ou de ces mémoires qu’on pense connaître, sans que ça soit le cas, et qui nous frôle comme le fragment effiloché d’un nuage, ou une mince volute de fumée, juste hors d’atteinte de la pleine conscience.

Noté ici comme moyen additionnel de provoquer une pleine réminiscence, peut-être.

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It is made of wood. On the front, the box has a formula in a Cyrillic-appearing script; someone told me it’s in Slavonic, the liturgical language for the Orthodox church. I don’t know if this is true or not. Found in a second-hand shop, it’s one of those objects for which you experience an attraction and an attachment you can’t explain – feelings that often serve as the starting point for a piece of writing.

But the box escapes me. True, it appears in one story in the making, but still it eludes me. One of those “you think you know, but you don’t” objects or memories that hover just out of full consciousness, like the ragged remnant of a cloud or a wisp of smoke.

Recorded here as yet another way to jog the recollection out of its hiding place, perhaps.