We are assured there is this future for new literature, an opportunity to distinguish one's work from its innumerable ancestors, to read and create texts capable of surviving time's crucible, works visible to the naked mind, words that may be memorable. Sometimes when regarding the readshift I step away from the literary cosmological model and consider the readshift as more of a historic phenomenon through which texts pass, occasionally to arise from the extremes of that experience with little apparent change. And by change, I refer not only to the physical structure of a literary document, but also the manner in which it is conveyed and interpreted. Allusions alter across time. Old meanings and contexts are forever lost.
New understanding arises.
Shakespeare's works continue to drift from us, yet we strain after them with generational interest, astronomical curiosity. Deep in the night sky of the literary universe glow starlike the works of Chaucer, Dante, Homer, Plato, Herodotus, and those before them. Nearer to us, burn authors like Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, and closer yet all those we associate with the written word. All their works enter the readshift, moving from their original contexts to some further points in the darkness. They each glowed intensely and near to us when they first appeared, but they are all destined to move from us in some sense, although never completely from view.