Writing as Hand-to-Hand Combat

Writing always is a sustained conversation with others — more often than not, it opens up a liminal space to converse with dead writers. Thus, writing feeds on the writer’s compulsion to read — therein lies the problem. A persistent reader (enter Coleridge, bookworm par excellence) cannot write — not even begin to do so — without suffering the quotations and reminiscences that come to mind from all that he has read. But such whisperings he must mute as soon as he sets out to write. (This touches upon a phenomenon that noted critic Harold Bloom labeled “the anxiety of influence.” Notice also what Borges says about reading at least two-thousand books plus, “Utopía de un hombre que está cansado,” in El Libro de Arena.)