Aleksandar Hemon, Iubiri și obstacole, Editura Black Buttons, traducere de Anca Dumitrescu, 2016

Macalister talked to me, angerlessly. Occasionally, I had a hard time following him, not least because Faruk had sent over another bottle, allegedly his best wine. Macalister had been in Vietnam; he had experienced nothing ennobling there. He was not Buddhist; he was Buddhistish. And the Pulitzer had made him vainglorious—“vainglorious” was the word he used—and now he was a bit ashamed of it all; any serious writer ought to be humiliated and humbled by fame. When he was young, like me, he said, he had thought that all the great writers knew something he didn’t. He’d thought that if he read their books he would learn something, get better. He’d thought that he would acquire what those writers had: the wisdom, the truth, the wholeness, the real shit. He had been burning to write, hungry for that knowledge. But now he knew that that hunger was vainglorious; now he knew that writers knew nothing, really—most of them were just faking it. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know, nothing on the other side. There was no walker, no path, just walking. This was it, whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever it was, and you had to make peace with that fact.

“This?” I asked. “What is this?”

“This. Everything.”

excerpt from The Noble Truths of Suffering, The New Yorker, 2008