The Word is alive. We have always known it. But it needs to be uttered, aloud or in the mind of a reader. Without a consciousness to tickle them into life, those books were dead.
He didn't seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn't appear to belong to our world. But that didn't seem the same as being mad.
Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.
Of course, there are things that are indifferent to human opinion – gravity, the moondriven motion of the tides, the boiling point of water. But the finer details of reality – the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person’s true nature – ...
There is something talismanic about familiar words.
