That's Mrs. Butler to you, my dear

I've never read Samuel Butler. Until now, that is. Why is that? I shall never know. What I do know is that he is my new dead literary soulmate.

From The Way Of All Flesh:


(I have underlined the part of the text that I brought to my lips and kissed.)

Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose
minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves,
the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have
given rise to them.  Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of
the subject and there must be nothing new.  Nor, again, did he see how
hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how
closely this is paralleled in the difficulty of saying where a life
begins or ends, or an action or indeed anything, there being an unity in
spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity.

Can you think of a better description of fanfiction? Unity in spite of infinite multitude, infinite multitude in spite of unity.

I would wax rhapsodic about this man at length, but I have a book to finish!