Each one of us must accomplish Noah's mission afresh. We must be the pure, individual Ark of all things, the refuge where they are not content to be what they were or imagined themselves to be, narrow, perishable life-traps, but where they become transfigured, freed from form, and merge completely into the inwardness of their essence where they are somehow preserved from themselves, untouched, intact at the pure core of indeterminacy. Yes, each of us is Noah. But our mission consists less in saving all creation from the flood than, on the contrary, in plunging it into the deepest waters where it vanishes permanently and radically. Indeed such is man's vocation. If everything visible must become invisible, if this metamorphosis is our purpose, then our intervention is apparently quite superfluous the metamorphosis will occur quite naturally on its own, for everything is transitory and what is transitory always sinks into profound existence. So what use are we in this life-saving mission, we the most transitory of all things, the first to disappear? What is useful is our readiness to disappear, our ability to perish, our fragility, our weariness, our aptitude for death.

Maurice Blanchot, "Rilke and Death"

The presence of poetry is in the future. It comes from beyond the future and does not cease to come when it has come. A different temporal dimension from that of the world we have mastered operates in language when it reveals, through the rhythmic scansion of life, the space of its unfurling. It does not state certainties. Those who rely on certainty, or even on lesser forms of probability, do not seek the skyline, nor are they fellow-travelers of the singing mind whose five ways of playing are played in the realm of chance.

Maurice Blanchot, "The Book to Come"