Justin Taylor

“You’ll have to believe me that I haven’t been withholding this to be coy, or because I was scared to face this story, though it’s possible that both those things are true. I’ve held off telling it because I believe that when you speak, you are always also listening—or you should be. You are trying, in a sense, to “overhear” yourself, and so to be changed by what you have heard yourself reveal no less than if someone other than yourself were the one revealing it to you. Revelation was what I was afraid of: self-knowledge and change. Molly said Harold Bloom said that this capacity for self-overhearing is what Shakespeare’s characters do in their soliloquies—they listen to themselves, are changed, and then act based on that change—and that this is the foundation of modern human consciousness. Or something. I’m not saying I followed it all, but I did take the trouble later to peruse the relevant Wikis, where I learned that Bloom borrowed this idea from Hegel. Or maybe what I really did was hire Molly to ghostwrite this whole book for me, and here she is throwing in Easter eggs that reveal her unacknowledged legislation of my story.”
― Justin Taylor, Reboot: A Novel