The hardest thing in the world is not to be you. Literature tests out the difficulty and challenges it. However self-preoccupied we become, however much our fictions call out to us as commentaries on ourselves, or as more or less fantastic reflections of the writers themselves, literature demands an exercise of the aesthetic and ethical imagination that gives us the rare opportunity not to be us. The experience of entering mentally into the strange terrain of otherness, of overhearing other selves, opens up alternatives to ourselves. It is like hearing the ravens hawking from tree to tree announcing their absolute difference, announcing a world you never made, that runs without reference to you, that is full of beings that don't know of you, who guide their lives unconcerned about whether you find them beautiful or annoying or even irrelevant.