This is not autobiography, because autobiography focuses on episodes and events. It is not even a question of writing as metabolizing or processing mourning. Instead, it is what remains after using the metabolized raw material. I do not think there is anything clearer than what Rimbaud expressed with the example of quintessence. The episodes and events are there as we have cultivated them, we have subjected them to distillation-metabolization, which can also be an unwritten procedure, and finally, here are the drops that fall from the still. This is the writing of these pages. That they are not a novel, linear or circular as it is, because the episodes-events are dis-regarded. Which is not poetry, not so much because of the absence of rhyme and rhythm, but because the writing of those drops is spread out. Which is not an essay because, while proceeding in a heuristic way, they do not support a thesis or more theses, but they tell a journey. Semprun's beautiful book, L'écriture ou la vie, comes to mind, but that book belongs to the sacred and these pages to the profane. In the end, however, Semprun chooses writing, making him the teaching of Levi. Still the sacred. These pages do not choose writing over life. They argue, indeed they claim, that writing is life tout court. And they can do it because they know they belong to the profane world, respecting the sacredness of the mentioned authors to whom they know they can not even remotely approach.