A box from my publisher arrived. Only two of us, a Japanese secretary and I, happened to be in the office. She knew that I'd been, day by day, awaiting this package. I began hacking at it with a kitchen knife, but she, seeing my clumsiness and sensing the gravity of the occasion, took the blade from me and opened the box with the delicacy a sushi chef shows a tuna's belly. Ceremoniously, she handed me my first book.
Some writers seem capable of perpetuating such feelings of enchantment.
Since he held a high opinion of himself at the outset, I suppose by now he must have overtaken Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville. For those writers who lack this sense that they are steadily retooling the definition of literary excellence, publication's purest joys eventually give way to other, mixed pleasures, in an ebb and flow that feels like maturation. As some of the sheer enchantment wears off, your realization grows that any finished book is, predictably, a falling short. Out there in the distance, brightly, it leaps and dances, that unnamed and still uncaptured creature, that elusive and most excellent beast that was the book's beguiling genesis. Here is something both intimately related to your book nothing less than the clothing it will wear on library shelves into perpetuity and yet detached from it.