My search is for what authentically can be said about a life, how people talk about what is in their hearts and whether it is possible to do so at all outside the ironical. All this is meant to be in the most authentic voice I can here summon, knowing—aside from the theoretical questions—that my own authenticity is always in question even for me. Aware always also that as soon as you have read this I begin to disappear or, like Mallarmé’s swan, freeze into the form of my own inaction.