Musil’s remains the prototypical modernist confusion—a book so coterminous with life that it could end only outside its covers
Because the book that descends is not the same book that was hovering so peacefully in the empyrean. The book that descends is never that same book. It’s rather like a parody or satire of that book, but it’s not funny. Or it’s not funny to you.
The book that you now have in front of you, worded …
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
on translators vs writers
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
LET ME REPHRASE.
I know what I want to say, but I don’t know the words in which to say it. And this, I want to say, is the problem—a theological problem.
Let me rephrase.
As a writer, I go about my dull daily life with a book in my head. And, despite that dull daily life, let’s call my hea…
