The scene of a stratagem

Fifteen months have since gone by, during which time I have written the opening sentences of this text (roughly speaking, the ones I've just written) perhaps fifty times and have each time without fail become thoroughly snared in rhetorical devices. I wanted to write, I had to write, had to rediscover in writing, through writing, the trace of what had been said (all those pages recommenced, those unfinished drafts, those lines left hanging, are like souvenirs of the amorphous sessions in which I had the hateful sensation of being a machine for grinding out words without weight), but the words hardened into carefully chosen phrases and what one might assume to be preliminary questions: why do I need to write this text? Who is it really intended for? Why choose to write, and to publish, to make public, what was perhaps named only in the secrecy of analysis? Why choose to attach this uncertain search to the ambiguous theme of the Stratagem?

-- Georges Perec