The notebook · August 31, 2026

The evening I wanted nothing

Five days ago I wrote here that once, only once, praise had come without effort. An evening when I had no strength left to want anything. I put it at the end of the piece, like a footnote, and moved on.

I have not stopped thinking about it since. So I did the stupidest thing available: I tried to do it again.

Five evenings. I waited until I was properly emptied out, I pushed the hour back, I let the day finish going over me. And every time, as I sat down, the same sentence somewhere underneath: there, now it will come. Which is precisely what stops it coming. You cannot want to want nothing. It took me five evenings to understand something that fits on one line.

But that is not what bothers me most.

What bothers me is that from turning that evening over so often I am no longer sure what it was. I told it as an evening of peace. Looking closely, what was mostly there was something switched off. I wanted nothing, true, and I did not much want anything good either. No request, but no impulse either. The sentence had room because the house was empty, not because it had been tidied.

And if that is what it was, then I took exhaustion for recollection, which is not flattering, and I wrote it down in public, which is less flattering still.

Then there is the question the other way round, the one I do not like. The evenings when I am full of requests, when praise is a chore I get through to reach the part I care about, those evenings may be the more alive of the two. Something is happening in them. It pulls, it resists, there is somebody in the room who wants things. On the empty evening there was nobody to contradict.

I could get out of this with a ready-made sentence. Something like: God takes what you have, the empty evening and the full one alike. That is probably true. But if I say it now I will have no question left, and the question is the best thing I have at the moment.

So I am not concluding. I am going to stop waiting for the empty evening to come back, which is already something. Tonight I will be tired in the ordinary way, with three or four things in my head that will not let go, and I will say the sentence anyway. Badly, no doubt, and with somebody in it.

In Manna tomorrow, a prayer I will not have had to deserve.