The great cruelty of writing is this realization that the experience for which I long the most as a reader—an encounter with someone who makes me believe that they have articulated exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, in the most perfect and irreplaceable terms—is a kind of death. The sublimity of total recognition is the sublimity of inescapable failure; reading the text you have been searching for means that you can never write it. Discovering something like this is to experience at once a thrilling and a hopeless self-obliteration.
