Growing ever-weary at the prospect of writing, you think about the fact that you will never be able to know what people think when they read your work, the fact that you will never be able to know what you will think when you later read your own work, the fact that reading unveils itself in sentences, in 100-yard increments—that we will never see what people think in those 100-yard increments, even if we were to watch them read from over their shoulder, and even if they were to write a review, which would supposedly contain everything they thought while reading.

You wonder whether writing can really be a form of religion, as we surrender ourselves to that infinite distance between the period and the next capital letter, as we trust that the author has somehow constructed that distance perfectly—has been in tune with some divinely wise blood, or some cosmic rhythm—such that we are all able to feel safe in that distance, such that we are all able to trail along without having to question whence we have come or whither we go, such that we are all able to understand each other.

You think about how much you adore Kierkegaard, and the way that he describes irony: as a way of speaking where we want others to give a response, where our certainty can only be garnered if they give us the response we seek without knowing that we seek it. He called himself an ironist, in honor of Socrates, who did not make statements, but merely asked questions as a means of getting to answers. You think about your own attempt to write anonymously so that people will agree with you without having to know that it’s you, wanting to know if they’d still agree if any other person named the rose sweet. You think about how we hide what we want to say so that it’s more meaningful when people put in the effort, or even have the shared quality, of finding out what we mean. (You think again about the polite game of poker, about Levin’s proposal, and how all our desires on contingent on other people’s.)

You think about the nod to Kierkegaard and David Lynch tucked away within the endnotes of Infinite Jest. You think about how these references come in a section where DFW writes parodical reviews of films that were never made, how this section was influenced by Borges’s style, about how Borges wrote his stories as reviews of imaginary stories, about how Borges only felt liberated to write personally when he was writing about himself as another person, about how those reviews try to capture an idea without having to go through the full story required to express that idea, and wonder if we might be able to ever successfully zip these ideas into compressed language, without losing everything in that compression.

You think about Zadie Smith’s essay on DFW from Changing My Mind, where she praises him for his labyrinthine capacity for writing, for giving selflessly to others through his writing. You wonder whether DFW was a genius or a narcissist, and what his condition might say about yours. You think about your own concerns about being narcissistic, of not wanting to take up space, while still feeling that you know something, that you have ideas that you are responsible for putting into form and sharing—though you fear that you might not be understood, though you fear that the form might be difficult to find, though you fear that you might come across as entitled in the process.

You think about Kierkegaard’s aphoristic question at the start of Either/Or, where he asks: “what if laughter were tears, and tears laughter?” And you think that you may not know what route pain and joy will take, but you feel pretty confident in your ability to know them when you see them. You think that the only option is to be sincere in what you think and feel, hoping that it somehow makes its way across the infinite bridge between times and people. You think about Jerry Seinfeld’s statement that jokes have an immediate verdict, that you can’t take back a laugh, and think about that maybe humor can describe our being-with-the-world, that maybe satire and irony are not so bad, if they can help us to be sincere. (Although, you also worry that there are cheap laughs out there, ones we ought to avoid). You think about DFW’s line: “One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.” Thinking about it all, you wonder if you’re thinking about much, but hope that maybe it’s okay not to know.

You think about the idea that smart people suffer more, but not in the sense of the tortured artist or the supposed correlations between IQ and rates of depression, because you are aware that these definitions of intelligence and artistic genius are flawed, as are the romanticized depictions of self-pitying and supposedly intellectual martyrs. You think about the aphorism: “joy is to want each thing in its season.” You think about the extent to which “ignorance is bliss” can be equated with this aphorism. You think about the extent to which knowledge is knowledge of something else, knowing that things can be different. You think that knowledge always leads to a critical mentality, of one’s being aware of something as being inadequate, and that this knowledge does not need to come from the supposed sources of intelligence that IQ tests and art reviews intend to measure—it might even come from trauma and imposed difference, as well as the willingness to look directly at one’s traumas and displacement.

You think about Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin, where one attempts to be-with-the-world such that one feels oneself at home in it. You think of all the imagery of one’s being immersed in the world, and you think about how the idea of being surrounded also connotes an idea of being unable to see the exterior Other, of being enclosed within a totality. You think about those moments when you watch a film and are unaware of your watching it, when a piece of art has you totally rapt, or wrapped, within the experience of that art. You think about your inability, in those moments, to see the surrounding the frame, to see the difference between the theater and the screen; and, you think about how the screen envelopes you, and how that may be exemplary of the kind of immersion which Heidegger and Hölderlin describe. You think about beauty, truth and happiness as the inability to imagine the world as being otherwise, the absence of a desire for change. You think about joy as being joy for no particular reason, because anything that requires a reason will ultimately be unfulfilled.

You think about Kierkegaard’s line from Fear and Trembling, where he says that the leap of faith is like the move most difficult and most beautiful for any dancer, where one calculates one’s jump perfectly, so that one lands into place without faltering or moving an inch further. You think Kierkegaard means that those who are able to be happy, despite the absurdity of existence, are able to expect nothing more than what they are given. You think about the jump as depicting a total release of all one’s energy, so that nothing is left, so that the boundless is trapped within the finite point upon which one bounds.

In thinking about that mystical distance between each word, and those writers who are entrusted as the guardians of that space, you think about James Joyce’s Ulysses. You think about your own writing in relation to James Joyce’s Ulysses, first to that notissimus final chapter where Molly Bloom’s thoughts bleed onto the page, but then to that under-appreciated penultimate chapter (which was apparently Joyce’s favorite) where the descriptions are written as a kind of call-and-response, question-and-answer. As if the narrator were speaking directly to the reader, who was eager to find out each detail—e.g. Q: “Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these migrations in narrator and listener?” A: “In narrator by the access of years and in consequence of the use of narcotic toxin: in listener by the access of years and in consequence of the action of distraction upon vicarious experiences”—disguising the obvious fact that the book was written by an author choosing which imaginary details to present to the reader.

You greatly enjoyed this chapter, and thought about the extent to which it details Heidegger’s phenomenon of Sorge—where every being is identified as having care or concern for its own being, such that the inability to remove this concern is what identifies one’s being—without having to dive into the abstruse language that the phenomenologist would later use. You think about the fact that every question is first identified by a care for its answer, by a desire to know something. (You think of the counter-example of the polite questions posed by those who don’t really care about how anyone else is doing, and have the immediate counter-argument that the faux question is still posed because the fraud has a care for appearances, and that the faux question doesn’t really matter anyway because what is at stake is not the kind of inauthentic rehearsed language we use, but the internal dialogues that carry us between moments.) You imagine our primordial way of being-with-the-world, that kind of interstitial time that we have a hard time seeing, as being like Husserl’s idea of intentionality, like children when they are presented with new toys, as they pick them up and bring them before their faces, asking: “what’s this?” You think about the author’s responsibility—or that of any artist, for that matter—as being attuned to these temporal processes of curiosity, so that they may make the details flow smoothly from one to the other, so that they are again the guardians of that space between words and sentences.

You think about how all our thoughts could be divided into ever-smaller questions and answers. You think about the way that James Joyce was able to depict time, insofar as Ulysses represents an entire day in over 700 pages, trying to represent every possible second of that day. Thinking about how much space for a day must be in 700 pages, you wonder how much ground is left to be uncovered within our own experience, and to what extent we rely on literature and film to spot and thereby appreciate our experience (as you had earlier claimed we do).

You wonder if one could truly say that literature is secondary to philosophy, rather than that literature is the font of philosophy. Similarly, you wonder whether your ideas, when they are expressed in comic or colloquial form (as with the “2:43pm etc.“) are any less insightful or meaningful than those present within academic and philosophical papers, which make constant use of neologisms, multi-lingual play, hyphenated phrases and italicizations. You wonder if the emperor has any clothes, and you think that the answer is probably: “One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”

You think about how Joyce describes the orbit of the Earth in that penultimate chapter, at the same time that he describes the furniture in the Bloom household. Q: “What moved visibly above the listener’s and the narrator’s invisible thoughts?” A: “The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.” Q: In what directions did listener and narrator lie?” A: “Listener, S.E. by E.; Narrator, N.W. by W.: on the 53rd parallel of lattitude, N. and 6th meridian of longitude, W.: at an angle of 45 degrees to the terrestrial equator.” Q: “In what state of rest or motion?” A: “At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.”

You think about writing a short story that begins: “At 11:57pm, Todd was doing the dishes; Mary was ironing; 357 Dublin-bound tourists, retiring for the evening, were reading the final chapter of Dubliners; The Beatles’s “Long and Winding Road” was being listened to by one heartbroken teen, who would have been convinced that he was born in the wrong generation, if it weren’t for the fact that, had he been born at any other time, he wouldn’t be in the same grade as his soulmate Melissa; Ed Sheeran’s ‘Thinking Out Loud’ was being played at the tail end of a couple dozen wedding receptions; and one recent Luddite-cult-escapee was finally getting to that one part of Sixth Sense where you find out that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time and is somehow still surprised by it—it was as if, all of a sudden, such vibrant colors and harmonies bloomed into existence, only to die down and disappear, perhaps to turn back on again…”

You hope that the description can capture the idea of the universe as occurring simultaneously, progressing in snapshots, and of texts and documents not as existing as preserved knowledge on library shelves (like bottled-up jam), but as flaring up in those moments when we find them, existing a word, a note, a frame, a reader, at a time. You think about how your describing essays and short stories that you’d like to write appropriates DFW’s and Borges’s attempts to synthesize an idea within a review of an imaginary other’s attempt to present that idea. You think about the fact that history and theory, much like literature and philosophy, are happening at the same time, thereby evading our comprehension or our placing one above the other; but, you still hope that this act of writing might take take place in that collective history, even if its colloquial form renders it ineligible for entry into the realm of theoretical writing.

Despite your growing anxieties about what it could all mean, and what it could all be worth, you are feeling a little better for having put your thoughts into a distinct, physical form, which may be reviewed or remodulated at some later time.

You think about the contemporary belletristic shift towards ego theory, towards writing down and investigating one’s own experience with the world, about Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. You also think about Martin Hägglund’s essay on Knausgaard, Augustine and Proust, how all these texts have influenced your own decision to write, and how your own writing might fit in relation to all those texts.

You think about Harold Bloom’s claim that Shakespeare, with his soliloquies, invented the act of overhearing oneself; and, you think about how it feels to read your thoughts later on, and the way that your thoughts change in relation to yourself when you find them exposed to the world, written down on a page or spoken aloud. You think about Bloom’s comment that Montaigne’s Essais mimic this Shakespearean, psychological profundity insofar as they demonstrate a vast capacity to investigate, to experiment on, oneself. You wonder if we are all attempting to overhear and preserve ourselves, and wonder if this is why we are willing to put so much effort into writing. You think about your initial experience finding those old essays, about how you overheard yourself then, and hope that this long-winded, five-part confession will someday be just as pleasing for you to find again. You think about the line of Vergil: “perhaps, someday, even this will be pleasing to remember [forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit].”

You are attempting to elide that vast arena of the unknown, to make it so that you are not faced with a constant and utter pressure of all that you are not seeing, so that you can trust in your instincts. As part of that process, you attempt to identify your own experiences as having a valid role within that vast canon of authors, some of whom you are able to recall and reference.

As you attempt to make your relation between your experiences and the dun-dun-dun, all-capital CANON a friendly and coterminous one, you think about Bloom’s role in establishing that daunting, agonistic Western canon. You think about his alleged predatory behaviors and sexual misconduct committed against his students at NYU and Yale, of which your friend had informed you. You wonder if Bloom is just another hideous man, or if he is the victim of gossip in the age of cancel culture. You wonder if a culture which says that we ought to listen to survivors, without providing the resources to empower survivors’ voices, has created such mayhem, where survivors have no option other than to testify through anonymous online groups, which may be exploited by those with the worst intentions. You wonder whose truth is truth, and how you might be able to find and access that truth, without the endless proliferation of evidence and data to sort through.

You wonder if the late Bloom was a stalwart and erudite defender of those books that we ought to keep reading, or if he was an elitist who exploited those with lower social standing than himself; who continuously read as a means of erecting barriers between himself and others, without having to confess his own experiences or thoughts beyond quoting poetry; and who used those quotes as means of garnering his higher social standing. You wonder how Bloom’s being or not being an example of rape culture reflects on our culture’s propensity to reward entitled and utterly destructive white men, whether this culture is hopelessly alienated from the facts at hand (maybe even is a front to hide those facts), whether you are wasting your time in writing, and whether you have wasted your time in reading this canon that now frequently makes its way into your thoughts.

Returning again, for the final time, to another present—suddenly you hear your friend’s voice, over the clacking of your keys, past the bedroom door: he calls you, wondering if you want to come to dinner. The sound of his voice, of your own name being molded within it, feels too large to be be held within such a banal stimulus, such a compact moment—another incomprehensible infinity. You feel that you have just descended a mountain, that you had just seen the world from such wondrous heights. You know that you could never explain all that you had seen, but still your epiphany instills such elation within you: it was as if you had leapt down, to land perfectly upon this one, tiny moment. You feel as if you had just received some sort of divine call, that an inner voice within you called back “here I am,” that your inner calling pulled you again to that ineffable “here,” that you have been brought back to the world.

You think about the first book of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, entitled “recalled to life,” and think about the proliferation of that phrase within the chapter and throughout the book, as a gravedigger imagines that he is haunted by undead spirits who have been “recalled to life,” as a prisoner of eighteen years summoned for his release is told that he has been “recalled to life.” You think about the idea of resurrection as it appears in A Tale of Two Cities, as well as in A Christmas Carol: how Scrooge’s experience after his visit from the ghost of Christmas future is a kind of resurrection, a second chance for him to live fully and authentically. You think about how Dickens’s characters always seem to open a window as a metaphor for their liberation. You think again of Tolstoy’s metaphor of the sun, of Dickens’s prisoner seeing the sun after being buried alive for 18 years, and wonder how it always must  feel—after such a long climb—to see the the world from above, and to see the ineffable object of one’s desire still rising to an even higher ascendency.

You think about your first and only experience blacking-out, when the ambulance rocked along the road, when you had no memory of having left the world, when you struggled to return back to your body and begin, again, forming memory, when the phrase “recalled to life” began to repeat inexplicably through your head, though you had read A Tale of Two Cities over a year ago—as if you were only dreaming; as if you were Dickens’s gravedigger, traveling in his rattling wagon; as if you were lingering in that domain between the corporeal and the ethereal, floating in that liminal space between life and death; as if you were fortunate to live again.

Though you are certain that you ought to go downstairs, you look at the white page on the screen and wonder if there is still more you should write. You wonder how you will come back to what you have written, what you will change or add—how you might re-format it, whether you will add DFW-style footnotes to try to make the thing more comprehensible.

When you do go downstairs you feel—to put truth to Tolstoy’s and Dickens’s motifs—as if every surface were swathed in an abundance of light, as the sun began to set. Your friends are smiling, and looking at you expectantly, but you feel dazzled by the lustrous glow of their cheeks, feel that you could not tell them what it was you had done or what you were feeling, feel that you could not even define for yourself what you were feeling. It was as if you—like the Ancient Mariner—had just come from a long journey, from which you gleamed a newfound appreciation for your surroundings. It was as if, in feeling this proximity between your experience and some grand, literary quest, you realized that you did not need to compare your own story with the annals of stories already written: that your story was indeed a story, just by virtue of it being your story; that the truth of your being lay in its very facticity.

You were overwhelmed by the fact that this image before you was all so very and indefinably real: it was as if you had forever before been observing the world from a camera lens, but were unaware of the fact that you were directing the camera. At first, you felt guilty for each movement of your eyes, because of who and what you might cut out of frame—such was your ravenous desire to consume every phenomenon that surrounded you. Suddenly it was as if you had stepped into the world from out your own eyes, suddenly you realized these friends were yours, that their lives were irrevocably tied to yours, that these moments were the stories you would later remember, the only stories you could tell. It was as if you were suddenly immersed in the world, were suddenly swimming in its very sheen.

You were calm and quiet, despite the storms that raged inside you. You did not exclaim the grandeur of being to your friends, as you engaged in the meaningless small talk of everyday conversation. You knew that this euphoria would fade, without your being able to remember how it felt, without your being able to reliably determine what had caused it, without your being able to bottle it up or reproduce it. You knew that gratitude and happiness are coeval, but that gratitude is as elusive an entity as self-understanding. You thought about a quote from Bergson, that we feel in such moments “as though we reflected back to surfaces the light which emanates from them, the light which, had it passed unopposed, would never have been revealed.” You find comfort in the idea that such light is always emanating, even when we are unaware of it, and hope that your writing might help you or others to be cognizant of that light, to appreciate rather than fear the interstitial infinities as we pass them by.