My best friend, my brilliant friend S—, is a great novelist, maybe the greatest that has ever lived. “Novelist,” what am I saying “novelist,” he’s a great writer in full, a poet, an essayist, a master of the short-story, an unmatched feuilletonist ... I’m the one who is limited to “novelist.” S— isn’t limited in any way. I only call him a writer because that is the area of his gifts I’m best able to understand, but he is also a philosopher, a scientist, a statesman .... Out of deference to me, I suspect, he has never written a line, because I openly wish to be a writer, whereas he simply is a writer or artist in every fiber and every molecule, in every thought or utterance, and whether these are written down and crafted into some form or not seems to me in a way to be a matter of irrelevance. He knows how central this idea of being a writer is to my sense of self, he must think it’s childish in me, yet it is in keeping with his custom that he tolerates and even appears to love this dream of mine and defers his whole being to it. I feel an immense regret every day of my life that S— doesn’t write. If he wrote even one line, I’m convinced that there are still enough learned and decent people in this world that it would be picked up and studied and marveled at, and he would forever thereafter be thought a master, and I would be a footnote in his life, which in fact is the truth of the situation. Instead he contrives that it will superficially appear the opposite, not knowing how ashamed I am that I have kept him from the world, as though I had sealed him up in the wall of my room with just a small space for his mouth, not for him to breathe but so that he can whisper to me the words I will write down. He makes a mockery of what I wish to be by simply being it, but I have done him too much wrong to blame him for the one thing he cannot control. I wonder whether when I told him as a boy that I dreamed of being a writer he heard that as a threat, as though I were holding a dagger to my own heart. He reveals his great novels and poems only in flashes that escape him as though he had suns inside him and planets, they appear in text messages and other such exclusively unimportant contexts, entirely unworthy of him, as though he had constructed them to disappear, like a secret agent’s messages. Perhaps every writer, I try to reassure myself, has always had such a friend, perhaps that is what it means to be a writer, to be the student of such a friend, the interpreter of him for the world and also as though a royal messenger carrying his words from the palace out into the kingdom and distributing them in such a way that they will be understood. In some ways it is quite a shameful occupation.