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Quite equal to the sound of a lone chirping in the night was the thought--I have wasted, somewhere, another opportunity! And where was its sign? In the land of the honest, into which I am loathe to peek. What motivates one to throw around words that sound fine together while advancing some half-buried theory of the Gothic, let's say--or what inhibits one into merely offering these ideas succinctly and usefully? Two opposing forces, that's all. The one wants to expand, savor, and never be done with an alluring thought. The other wants to know that this thought can be acquired at a reasonable price. Which are we to trust? In good writing, the choice should not be available to us. We cope with the linguistic overgrowth and blame ourselves for not getting the point--a pleasurable guilt, for a second reading will certainly resolve every ambiguity...

When the enthusiasm for vocabulary outstrips the exigency for an argument, the reader should at least be grateful for the opportunity to enhance his or her vocabulary. Peering into that blinding darkness of philosophical verbiage is a rare treat: only stylists of the first order can deliver the experience. The scenario of criticism turning into fiction is less likely than I previously thought, at least in my own criticism: guilt for abandoning the primary text is inescapable, and any bit of Durrellesque fiction I include in the critique is scrupulous to a fault, citing the master automatically without daring to stake a claim to originality.

Such fiction is self-consciously secondary while refusing to appear naive: such a work as the Alexandria Quartet would be treacherously difficult to reproduce, yet the fear of disastrous failure is less severe than the dread of one's own fiction being rejected or ignored. Thus criticism can at times be formulated as a training ground, even at the graduate level: an introductory composition course asks basically the same questions of the transfer from explorations of personal relevance to an objective reading, while bona fide literary criticism is a more varied arsenal of similarly self-centered questions...

Such as?