There is a feeling, characteristic of youth, that compared to everyone else, one is wise, intelligent, that one Understands! In youth, this is forgiven. If this conviction persists beyond those years, one becomes an official buffoon, and life becomes a torment; for despite all our imagined wisdom and grasp of things, the world slips through our fingers. It has to. To not notice this is the mark of a buffoon.

If the feeling departs along with youth, a certain kind of emptiness remains. I have been grappling with this emptiness for quite some time. Information reaches me, and I occasionally link it through logical relations and catalog it, yet it still fails to fill the library beneath the vault of my skull. This is perhaps why my writing is largely restricted to experiences (The Evolution of Seeing).

I often return to Stanislaw Lem’s writing. Occasionally, I discover something I hadn’t previously read (it is much the same with the songs of The Beatles). To me, Lem is superhuman. Or rather, if Lem is human, then I am a tiny beetle. The epistemological Gregor Samsa. My six legs tap rhythmically against the marble floor. In the void beneath the vault of my skull, the tapping echoes. Typewriting the void.