The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well. - Jorge Luis Borges

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words — or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols — spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." (From the Introduction of 1941's The Garden of Forking Paths)