Among the works that I thus feel an aesthetic kinship with, and an imaginative debt to, are The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, and Pensées, by Blaise Pascal. For it was by way of an encounter with these books, when I was younger, that I began to fathom the possibilities of a literature that extends the range of an author’s more arbitrary inclinations, and, in fact, validates them, without forcing that author to abandon or disregard the comfort that a reader looks for in the shape of a narrative.