Readers and writers

There are very few books of which one can say, 'there's not another like it.' Those who read this sort of book, often the most difficult books to ever written, end up thinking, 'if this book fell in the forest when no one was around would it make a sound?' When reading such a book, the reader and writer are allowed to trade places: the writer, thinking that his or her book would never be read by anyone else, becomes the reader who realizes that if this book is difficult to read it must have been exponentially more difficult to write.

This kind of relationship between reader and writer only occurs in a book that's achieved the sort of singularity of which it can be said, 'there's not another like it.' Only writers of the past come to mind; Sterne of course, who readers of the future will no doubt come more and more to value. And Pessoa, who writes of the compostion of the The Book of Disquiet, '"were I to dream it, it would be perfection; the mere fact of writing makes it imperfect. That is why Iam writing it."