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.

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

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