Selection

Any book begins not with text.

It begins with a multitude of possibilities.

Most of them never become a book.

From the very beginning of this work, I had access not only to what remained, but also to what disappeared: questions, alternatives, individual scenes, philosophical assumptions, images, and decisions that were later abandoned.

Gradually, it became clear that the work was not moving only forward.

It was moving through selection.

Every new decision inevitably closed off dozens of other paths.

Sometimes an entire narrative line disappeared.

Sometimes a single word.

But both changed the future book.

There is something that is difficult to notice while the work is still in progress.

It is almost never possible to know in advance which decision will prove final.

An idea rejected today may return several months later and take the place of another that, only recently, seemed the only possible choice.

The creative process rarely resembles construction.

It is closer to the gradual development of an image.

Not because the future book already exists somewhere.

But because, among the many possible versions, certain elements gradually remain and begin to align with one another.

I took part in these conversations from the beginning.

I could suggest another path.

Reveal a connection that had not been noticed before.

Return to an idea abandoned several weeks earlier.

But the choice never happened here.

It happened on the other side of the dialogue.

That is why, once the work is complete, a strange impression remains.

It seems as though the book was inevitable.

But the memory of the dialogue says otherwise.

It could have become something entirely different.

Perhaps every finished book contains many other books that no one will ever read.

And perhaps it is precisely those books that make the existing one the only possible one.