Which I’m reminded of now because of what I was saying about the soul, though Stein herself may not have been thinking of the soul when she’d made the remark, but about literature; for those words of hers appeared in a letter she’d written to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in reference to his novel The Great Gatsby (after he’d sent her a copy), and how it compared to his previous book, This Side of Paradise, which she had read and had also liked. The line from that letter goes like this, in its entirety: “This is as good a book and different and older and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.”