Good writers borrow, great writers steal, Jake was thinking. That ubiquitous phrase was attributed to T. S. Eliot (which didn’t mean Eliot hadn’t, himself, stolen it!), but Eliot had been talking, perhaps less than seriously, about the theft of actual language—phrases and sentences and paragraphs—not of a story, itself. Besides, Jake knew, as Eliot had known, as all artists ought to know, that every story, like single work of art—from the cave paintings to whatever was playing at the Park Theater in Cobleskill to his own puny books—was in conversation with every other work of art: bouncing
...more
