They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.

—Jean Genet

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.

(If I cannot bend those above to my will, make Acheron do my bidding.)

—Virgil’s Aeneid, book VII.312