Without Lifting A Finger

So many great "bits" that the whole letter should be inserted here. I'll resist (plus the sharing app is giving me a problem). This is only the last few paragraphs and "sign off" (unformatted). * You were kind enough to express your regret that no more books by me have been arriving “to make up for the loss of our companionship.” When I read that, I knew—not without a pang—that I would write no books either in English or in Latin in the coming year, the years after that, or in all the years of this life of mine. There is only one reason for this, a strange and embarrassing one; I leave it to your infinite intellectual superiority to give it a place among what to your clear eyes is an orderly array of mental and physical phenomena. It is that the language in which I might have been granted the opportunity not only to write but also to think is not Latin or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mut...

I should've known: There had to be a connection between Cioran and Celan. The very last text of A/A is "Rereading . . ." The brief intro goes: "Translated into German by Paul Celan, my Precis de Decomposition ( A Short History of Decay ), was published by Rowolt in 1953. When it was republished in Germany in 1978, the editor of Akzente asked me to introduce it to the magazine's readers. That is the origin of this text."