I write when I cannot hold back any longer. Call it an attack, an ir­resistible impulse. In a way, my writing has almost been clandestine. There was … - Amalia Kahana-Carmon

I think I am mostly concerned with two issues: death-in-life versus life, and chaos versus order. These two are clearly intertwined, of course. I am talking about the individual revolt against the established order of things, the attempt to break through the visible. This attempt brings about an epiphany of a wider order of things which underlies our existence.

I wrote about the hard way in which one learns the pain of the break between dream and reality. And you know, in the beginning I tended to write, for lack of a better term, in the “romantic” vein. I was trying to search for human nature through the external order of things. I wanted to touch human misery without getting my hands dirty, out of a peculiar fastidiousness. I think I changed tremendously in this sense. I am not as much of an outsider anymore. I am more capable now of observing the pain, and being part of it at the same time. I have learned to come to terms with the “concrete” and naked reality and not flinch from expressing it in a more direct fashion.

Every human encounter is the external embodiment of an attraction between two magnetic fields. The encounter comes suddenly, unexpectedly. It is a moment of truth. It is a moment of revelation, as when the right ray of sun penetrates through the right window pane, and falls with the right slant on one picture in the museum. This is the painfully short moment which shows us just what the artist had in mind. It happened to me once. I walked into a bookstore in Jerusalem. I opened one book after another, when suddenly I found myself reading something breathlessly. It was a book of poems by Pinhas Sadeh. There was a flash, I was touched by something powerful. For some reason, I could not purchase the book right away. A while later, back in Tel Aviv, I went to buy the book. When I opened it this time it was—difficult. The angle had changed. The ray of light passed me by. There was no illumination. The same happens with human encounters. We meet someone, and suddenly we are capable of being ourselves, just like we were supposed to be—ourselves without hiding, without pretending, with no pretexts. We are each a magnetic field. And each attraction, limited as it may appear to be, is a cosmic happening—it occurs within the broader pattern of things, within the endlessly complex structure which underlies our lives.