And now you understand: Stalker is part of the Zone, and his whole life belongs to it. Until the life he leads outside the Zone was also lived within it; until the items on his nightstand in his room are there because they were first of all in the Zone. And when he lies down to dream, it is the Zone that wakes up inside him. And when he guides the others through its traps and temptations, it is the Zone that would like to know itself, to find its way back to the event by which it came to birth.
Stalker will speak of his friendship for the ones he guided. Friendship: he steered them, as the Zone steers him. It is the Zone that burns between them. It is the Zone, blind and unconscious, that returns between them. Returns - but without coming to itself. For there is no 'itself'; the Zone is not the Zone. Or in that 'not' it is also everything; it is what gives itself in the world that would lie outside it. Gives itself, and by way of its withdrawal, as what it is not.
The Zone is not the Zone: and who is Stalker? The one who goes by not-knowing, and whose unknowing is the way the Zone comes to itself. Comes - as it does not come. As it stands outside itself: Zone, will you have been anything but the incidental? Will you have ever been otherwise than what is seen from the corner of the eye? Then what is a friendship that passes thus, by way of the incidental? What is a friendship that lives by way of the rebirth of the Zone, its infinition?
The ordinary is not the ordinary, or in that tautology, the ordinary is the ordinary, it lives already as what it is not. As though it were disjoined from itself, and fire burns along the breaks of its articulation. The extraordinary: I will not speak of the depths of the ordinary, but of its infinite surface, its infinition. As though it were the ice sheet across which the aurora borealis flashes, and the bright stars. Everything, it is everything. Or it is what interrupts itself in everything and shows the world as what is torn apart.
The Zone is the world. No: the world is also what the Zone is. The world is its crust, its ashes. How deep is the wound? The wound is the world; it does not heal, and its suffering is the Zone. Is it possible to say: I suffer myself? Is it possible to say: I suffer everything? The Zone suffers itself. No: the world is the suffering of the Zone. The Zone would become itself, but there is still the world.
And isn't that the way friendship would pass? And love? By way of the incidental; by way of that detour-interruption that breaks the joints of the present world. That unjoins them, or shows they were forever unjoined, and that fire burns along the sutures. You cauterise a wound to close it, but is there another fire that burns around a wound forever unclosed? Is it possible to say: I am dying? Is it possible to say, I am young in my death, and in my dying?
There is a kind of youth that subtracts itself from the world, and draws the world after it. A youth unpossessed, or whose happening is dispossession. To be young again - how old am I, and how is it I have already come to the end of my life? Youth accuses. Youth says: what you have lived is false; the ordinary is not the ordinary. Youth says: turn around, turn, lose yourself in the incidental. How to cross the world at another angle?
Youth suffers itself in you. Or: what you suffer is always your youth, that blazing moment that seems to detach itself from the possible. Until you suffer the impossible, you suffer the place you cannot occupy. Is that way youth passes by way of the other person, and by way of friendship? Isn't it the other who would be young in your place?
The Zone is nothing for Stalker on his own. He is a guide; he steers the ones who will become his friends. But that friendship is not his - or it is that it is first of all a friendship with the Zone, and a way in which the Zone comes to live a life. Friendship, by way of the others, and for the Zone.
Dream of that friendship in the world that affirms the incidental, that is friendship for the incidental. Give the world to me; let it give itself to be, and by way of the incidental, by way of what gives itself through you. Gives itself, gives and forgets itself; gives and lets its youth, its eternal return, burn in your place as it leaps across to burn in mine.
'I would like to live, and to live by dying. I would like to die to life and into life.' The Zone has awoken; Stalker is asleep.