After a lengthy silence, during which both men eyed each other searchingly, the man from Szolnok County declared that he had been preparing for some time to write on a few pages and send the pages to the young woman in America, but he was afraid that if he wrote on too many pages someone in America might bind the pages into a book with his name on it, after which the people of America might well suppose he was dead.→[More:]

At this, the writer of books leapt suddenly to his feet, drained his glass with a flourish, and strode purposefully to the glass door of a bookcase on a shadowy wall. Gesturing passionately towards the hundreds of volumes, he announced:

‘You are dreaming of yourself writing in the library of a manor-house, in Szolnok County, but while you were dreaming at your table I was writing on pages of books.

‘You are dreaming of yourself writing to a young woman in America, but in all the years while I was writing, no young woman wrote to me from America or from any other country.

‘I am a writer of books. I have died. I never saw, nor ever could have seen, the land of America, but I wanted to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring dream-prairies.

‘I am a writer of books. I am a ghost. While I was writing I died and became a ghost. While I was writing I saw ghosts of hundreds of books that I have never seen, nor will ever see, in libraries where ghosts of men that I have never seen, nor will ever see, dreamed of writing to young women in America. I saw ghosts of my own books in ghosts of libraries where no one comes to unlock the glass doors of bookcases. I saw ghosts of men staring sometimes at ghosts of glass panes. I saw ghosts of images of clouds drifting through the ghost of an image of sky behind ghosts of covers and spines of ghosts of books. I saw ghosts of images of pages white or grey drifting through the same ghost of an image of sky. And I went on writing so that ghosts of images of pages of mine would drift over ghosts of plains in a ghost of a world towards ghosts of images of skies in libraries of ghosts of the ghosts of books.’

Inland, by Gerald Murnane