I feel pretty glum and devote myself to reviewing. There is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I try very hard indeed to understand that book but fail completely. It is almost impossible to decipher, and when one or two lines of understanding emerge like telegraph poles above a flood, theyareat once countered byother polesgoing in the opposite direction.

-Nicolson, Sir Harold
  Diary entry, 29  Apr.

  The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

-Nietzsche, FriedrichWilhelm
  The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 278.