Monsieur Quiniane engaged me on probation : "One month, with lodging", he breathed. When I came to his office, at the Security and Protection Agency, he was brief.
"Name?"
"Rutil."
"References?"
I handed him a hastily curriculum vitae: warehouse watchman, markets, shopping centers.
"No serious references… Well?"

---

Rutil also has a perpetual nostalgia for the unchanging times he left at his birth to take on tenuous life. What was he, before being expelled from the river, what was he before he existed, what about the state that prevailed before the world? If the flow were to stop for good, would he not finally see things as they are, in their very being, outside language which betrays them and annuls them even as he designates them? Could the universe, stranger to all duality, not then, immanently, profess "some great science of non-knowledge"? In the shadow of established language and its limited associations, there is perhaps a matter, intelligent without knowledge, whose rustlings the watchman sometimes fancies he hears in his limbs as in the particles of nature, in the fluorescences and evanescences of the atmosphere, in this "crossroads in the sky where the stars rest".

(extrait de la postface de Jean-Noël Picq)