Works do not have a meaning, rather they have different possible readings, and the possibility of reading lies in the fact that at the heart of the work there lies an absence. The center of the work is a void; this is what fascinates.

The fault of impatience is the desire for the work to mean something. In Kafka's case, as he sometimes writes in his diaries, this was the desire for the work to be a means of salvation. The other side of his experience, however, was the failure of writing; the numerous stories begun and then abruptly aborted. Writing as a terrifying experience of the impossibility of writing. This as the 'truth' of writing, rather than as a sanctuary for someone expelled from the ordinary world of work and love.

The everyday world is made up of meanings which are present to the individual and therefore determined by a horizon of truth. It is this world which disappears in the work. The world of the work is quite different from the world of work. In the everyday world, all is there to be grasped and acted upon. In the world of the work, everything appears ambiguous, and the horizon of this ambiguity is the absence of meaning altogether. The idea of a book only appears in its own impossibility. Every individual author experiences this as the failure of the work to reach perfection.

The writer, unlike the philosopher, is not a mouthpiece for an anonymous truth; rather writing is the very experience of the impossibility of truth. - Will Large