CALL IT THE NEWSPAPER PROBLEM: About a decade ago I wrote an essay on contemporary poetry for a newspaper that will remain nameless and had the occasion to quote a line by “Eliot.” The editor sent back many changes, the most minor but telling of which was that the quotation was now attributed to “the English poet T. S. Eliot.” Vaguely piqued, I asked what the editor was trying to clarify: Was he afraid readers wouldn’t realize the quotation came from a poem? Or was he afraid readers might confuse the Eliot who wrote it with, say, George Eliot, the pseudonymous author of Middlemarch? Anyway, I noted that the “English” qualifier was misleading: Though T. S. Eliot had taken British citizenship, he’d been born in America. The editor, then, sent on another suggestion: “the American-born English poet T. S. Eliot.” I, having lost all the patience I had as a twenty-something-year-old, replied by modifying that tag to: “the American-born, British-citizen English-language poet, essayist, dramatist, teacher, publisher, and bank teller Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965),” after which the editor finally got the point and canceled the assignment.

Quba isn’t a one-horse town. It’s a half-horse town. The rear half. Smelly (from car emissions, outlying factories, sewage), hideous. Besides apples, Quba’s also known for its carpets—known for its carpets whose woven wool must inevitably soak up all the smells—and while the few formal stores display their wares flayed in windows, the bazaars roll them up and tie them and lean them against walls like they’re about to be executed by firing squad: carpets like multicolored, arboreally patterned bodies—carpets for use as multicolored, arboreally patterned bodybags.

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 head a type of heaven.

Up in the heaven of my head, this book is perfect. It’s complete. It’s complete and finished. From the first word to the last, though I don’t know what those words might be, though I might not even know anything about it: not the characters, the situations, the settings. All I know, all I have to know, is that it’s brilliant, this book of mine, and that it’s above me, like a star floating high, and that without even the slightest effort on my part, it’s shining brightly Up There—I know it’s shining even during daylight.

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 onto the page, or onscreen, is just a beaten ugly incarnation of its original perfect being, and it’s your fault. You have only yourself to blame. Because you couldn’t control yourself. Because you just couldn’t have left it twinkling in the ether. You had to call it down, you were so afraid, so jealous, that someone else might possess it. But now it’s yours, it’s all yours, a justly perverse reward for your needy greed and hubris. Now, instead of perfection, you possess a monster.

My daily routine, now that I’m finally over the jet lag: wake up at 6:00 A.M., write for four hours, get to Hummus Beit Lechem just when it opens. Order a hummus with egg, which is served with pita, pickled veg, and half a raw onion. Eat while reading Haaretz. Buy cigarettes and smoke my way back to writing by noon. I can choose between two routes; rather, between two sides of Herzl Street, neither of which gives any shade from the sun. One side has a store that sells birdcages. The other side has a store that sells birds. Both are run by Ethiopians and both are called “Song of Sheba.”

I quit by 7:00 P.M., and head out again for a shwarma or a falafel or a sabich, then wind down the day at a bar, reading the books I bought at Ha’Nasich Ha’Katan and Robinson, and drinking beer and arak until I’m sleepy (by 11:00 P.M.). The books, in Hebrew: Dolly City (Dolly City) by Orly Castel-Bloom, Hitganvut Yechidim (Infiltration) by Yehoshua Kenaz, and last but not least, Ha’Yored Lemala (The Acrophile) by Yoram Kaniuk, a great writer who was once very generous and kind to me, and whom I can’t avoid, or can’t avoid missing, not just because Tel Aviv was very much “his city,” but also because it’s been two summers now since he died.

IF YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU translate yourself. There’s an idea in your head, or an image, and it must find its way to words. There has always been a tension, a tension or an opposition, between writing that seeks to record life as experience, in the private language of experience, and writing that seeks to refine or winnow life into final statements, into fixities, with more-public vocabulary, syntax, grammar. On one hand, think of William Faulkner, who sends personal and so imperfect memories stumbling stuporously across Yoknapatawpha. Then, on the other hand, think of the safer, saner Saul Bellow, who tells us intellectually what Chicago means, clearly, even conclusively. This push/pull between inhabiting the self and experience, and making the self and experience intelligible to others, is especially pronounced among writers who write in second languages, and, to a lesser degree, among writers who write about a culture that is not the culture they are writing for or toward. Someone like Bellow, born to immigrants, born to Yiddish, beginning to write in post-WWII America under the sign of bestsellerdom, must have felt compelled to explain more, to explain his intentions, in a fancy Hyde Park version of the way my own relatives, when they spoke English, often spoke. very. slowly. and repeated themselves and repeatedly YELLED! to make themselves understood.

Instead, eighteenth-century literature was best concerned with identities—which might be defined, in a Hegelian sense, as the thoughts by which a person opposes knowledge. Such is the plot of the coming-of-age novel, in which a handsome young man—typically spurned by a handsome young woman who’s opted for marrying another, or death—sets out to find alternative meaning in life, which means, of course, himself. The Bildungsroman is often a closeted Künstlerroman or artist’s novel, as its protagonists are often the narrators (first person), and the narration frequently proceeds by letters addressed to friends or diary entries strictly for self, all of whom are metafictional proxies for the reader. Metafiction, literature conscious of its own literariness, is the belated sibling to canon and fugue, and mirror-play mise en abyme. But unlike in music or painting, autoawareness in literature must be accomplished in words, and so is not just acknowledged but also critiqued. Characters assume their own lives, quite apart from the stated intentions of their authors, and assume to comment on authorial plans and offer alternative prospects; their behaviors—obreptions, subreptions, editing peer characters (even if due only to the opportunities of epistolary structure), and passing among texts (Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, appearing as guests at a ball in John Kidgell’s The Card, 1755)—none are difficult to read as drafts of equivalent liberties in life.

THE DOUBLE IS THE DUPLICATED SELF, the progenitor of mass production. If all products of a certain use resemble one another, it’s because all means of production resemble one another, because all consumers are essentially disseminations of a single consumer, a phantasmagoria manufactured by advertisement in order that demand can manage supply.

Technology, to Heidegger, is whatever directs existence toward utility. Its expression is solely in its “enframing” (Ge-Stell), or the way by which technology recontextualizes all objects and even subjects by function: stones enframed as cutters of stones, rocks as producers of fire—a painting framed as a material asset, music measured only to rally morale or seduce (reproduced images, and recorded music, popularized these intentions). It follows, logically, that all frames are reversible, and might be hung upside-down: A man makes a thing, until the thing remakes the man. For Heidegger, the only way out of these co-instrumentalizing binds is Gelassenheit—“releasement”—which is to accept technology’s outward convenience, but refuse its inward reconfiguration. How to do this, however, he never explains.

B.) YOU’RE THE CAPTAIN of an American destroyer escort. Your ship is equipped with sonar. You transmit a ping, wait for the echo, ping and wait for the echo. Though whenever you ping a U-boat, by the time its echo is received, by the time its echo is processed, the U-boat’s in another place, but then you’re in another place as well, nearer, or farther, because the U-boat’s also pinging you, and you echo, you can’t help it. All sonar can detect is the past. The future floats between predictions. The U-boat might maneuver you astray, in a countermeasure obscuring the angles of your search, and so keeping concealed the second boat that would sink you. Though you might sink the first boat first.