Inimitability

Abstract

This essay reads the familiar concept of literary influence as a fantasy of proximity to those whose beauty resides in their unavailability—in an ease of phrase, grace of thinking, brilliance, music outside the common round and impossible to produce oneself. It is a melancholy irony of literary traditions that they should expand through the attempted retrieval of voices permanently lost. Keston Sutherland writes in Meditations (2024): “It hurt him to have to carry around so much missingness.” The shock in the subtext of reading and mourning is that you are carrying nothing at all.