The joy I feel whenever I copy, quote, or cite a piece of writing to my liking is difficult to describe. In my dotage, I could not care less about authorship. I am enchanted by words that hit the mark. That is, words that feel like my own. And I am oblivious to the fact that they are actually someone else’s. Fuck authorship! I go for the delight in words that make a difference, no matter whose. My own choice is of the substance rather than the original author (“Quotation as a Literary Form,” December 16, 2011). Slowly but surely, I have become a veritable quote hunter, no doubt (“A Quote Hunter,” October 3, 2013; and “Plucking Quotations Left and Right,” September 17, 2019). Even though my Residua is not exactly a commonplace book (“Hardly a Commonplace Book,” June 15, 2020), it now contains close to a thousand quotations without any embellishments of my own. Pure quotations or quotations as such, as it were. And the joy of knowing that they are always at my fingertips is amazing, indeed. My magnum opus is my own universe, which I can cross every which way without let or hindrance. The entire world of my own, and no kidding. But the joy of copying, quoting, or citing is always at my disposal. Authorship, schmauthorship.

In memory of Walter Benjamin