If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

‰ЫПIf one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПAt times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I read bears a stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПBetween the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.‰Ыќ