“Are there any other reasons for thinking it is better to write? Yes. One of them is very simple: because it is still possible to write in the classical style with a heightened sense of the risk and of beauty. This is the great lesson to be drawn from Del Giudice’s book, since in it, on page after page, there is a profound interest in the antiquity of the new. Because the past always re-emerges with a twist. The Internet, for example, is new, but the net has always existed. The net fisherman used for catching fish serves now not to enclose prey, but to open up the world to us. Everything remains, but changes; the everlasting is repeated mortally in the new, which is gone in a flash.”

(Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne, pp. 25–26.)