Judging the judge: do literary heroes live by their words?

Lost in unfulfilling art, writer searches for life's purpose

The commentariat in every age and epoch, with their eagerness to adjudicate and their need to dictate meaning, have in their various commissions formulated countless ways to capture the essence of liberation, as though it could be tapped and extracted like a syrup, or clad about with a definition both bespoke and interminable.

This being, for whom those that tried found impossible to articulate or apprehend, was neither individual nor horde, neither avatar nor void; this icon built from negative space; this blank dream whirling like a death mask in a feverish mind