What unlikely things we are, of course, with our voluntary locomotions, and our body heat which keeps our fat from congealing until death! — and how … - William T. Vollmann

Regardless of its textual component, Noh is ultimately indescribable, like sexual ecstasy; what consoles me for my failure of language is the fact that so is everything else. Moreover, Noh aspires to indescribability.

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

Bug, meanwhile, had learned at Marshtown that might made right, and he got older and paler, his head downcast like a nodding flower that expects itself to be cut at any moment.