"In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for a reader, like the pages of a book. And here he was, a mote of consciousness at the center of this rectilinear grid of information, this circuit board of signifiers, his little lump of appreciation accreted like a pearl out of all this text. The theorists were right; Vita was right. None of these volumes was the product of individual consciousness. It was the other way around. He, Nelson Humboldt, was the distillation of textuality, a bit of condensation, a by-product, a speck..." (255)
--Hynes, James. The Lecturer's Tale. New York: Picador, 2001.