After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.
Cărtărescu, Mircea. SOLENOID, trans. by Seán Cotter, Deep Vellum Publishing, Dallas, 2022: 42.
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