In an excerpt from her book, Writing, acclaimed novelist Marguerite Duras shared how watching the death of a common housefly taught her that stories are literally everywhere and in everything.
“Around us, everything is writing; that’s what we must finally perceive,” she wrote. “Everything is writing. The fly on the wall is writing; there is much that it wrote in the light of the large room, refracted by the pond. The fly’s writing could fill an entire page. And so this would be a kind of writing. From the moment that it could be, it already is a kind of writing. One day, perhaps, in the centuries to come, one might read this writing; it, too, will be deciphered, translated. And the vastness of an illegible poem will unfurl across the sky.”
