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The two literatures have similar origins: They both began as the tralatitious lore of the peasantry, of the poor and uneducated village and town, as opposed to the city

from high-minded entr’acte harangues

Musil’s remains the prototypical modernist confusion—a book so coterminous with life that it could end only outside its covers

they never believe the books to which they have dedicated their lives to have originated in some uncorrupted primordial form, some prelapsarian and unspoiled sublimity

This, in turn, inflames you, and you move on to cajoling, inveigling, wheedling, making use of every suasion in the synonymicon, making promises you can never fulfill