Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.