A corollary to this maxim might be: feeling the life of a single other existence or making felt, to another, one’s own single existence is a virtue unique to imaginative writing. ‘“Life”’ — as F. R. Leavis observes of Montale’s Xenia — ‘is a necessary word, but “life” is concretely “there” only in individual lives‘.2 What follows hereafter is a version of the attempt to understand ‘life’ through the written lives of three men: three writers whose imaginations struggled to express their own and others’ particularities. Understanding their words provokes a belief in the ideal of understanding their lives: understanding their lives justifies the attempt to understand their words — to do criticism. And this is simply the confirmation of the extraordinary illusion of language — somehow arbitrary sounds and signs are naturalized and the isolation of selves is transcended.
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