On my Google homepage, I subscribe to a series of quotes that change day to day. One is a daily Thoreau quote, one is a general literary quote, one is a daily Jon Stewart quote, and so on. I also receive daily quotes from Buddhism (the service applies the term a bit liberally, often ascribing Buddhist ideas to Taoist writers or even modern psychologists, though I do enjoy the illustration of Jung’s “collective unconscious”).
Today’s Buddhism quote, allegedly from Wei Wu Wei’s The Tenth Man, is, “I have only one object in writing books: to demonstrate that there could not be anyone to do it.”
Today, I’m finishing (for now) the scholarly preface to my dissertation, a novel narrated from the afterlife–by a dead narrator. How weirdly appropriate, then, to find this quote awaiting me this morning.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 