This is a beautiful little book. And I mean it when I say little-- the reading time came in at just under an hour. It's mostly due to the structure of the book, which is also its premise: each page contains a few lines, usually only a sentence or two, composed by Barthes on index cards during the two years following his mother's death.
Over the course of some 200 entries, Barthes explores issues in relationships, grief, love, and his own mortality. The rawness of seeing his innermost thoughts there on the page, and realizing that he wrote them while in the depths of such heavy feelings, is really what makes this book fantastic. It is moving in a way that is subtle and overwhelming at the same time (if that makes any sense at all), and certainly relateable for anyone to whom the spectres of death and grief have paid a visit.
Some excerpts that were particularly resonant for me:
"Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I'll be back at a specific time or to who you can call to say: voila, I'm home now."
"I write my suffering less and less yet it grows all the stronger, shifting to the realm of the eternal, since I no longer write it."
"We don't forget, but something vacant settles within us."
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