Getting lost.

There are many ways to get lost. You can get lost in a forest, as fairy-tale characters do. You can get lost in thoughts, as philosophers pretend. But there is a much more subtle, much more treacherous way of getting lost: getting lost in language. In words. In sentences that string together like the corridors of an imaginary cathedral, winding endlessly, leading to nothing – or to something too vague to seem intentional. And in that language, in that labyrinth of sentences, we find the reader. Or rather: the illusion of a reader, for what is a reader if he no longer understands himself?

This reader – let's give him a name for convenience, maybe something silly, something anonymous like the reader – is in a state of permanent uncertainty. Not because he is stupid. No, far from it. This reader is smart enough to know that he does not understand what is happening. He feels a cultural obligation to keep reading, to persevere, to make connections between metaphors that seem to point to symbols that then echo with concepts that maybe, just maybe, point to something that was once an idea. And so he reads on. Sentences are read, turned, reread. He hesitates over adverbs. He jots down adjectives as if they were clues in a disappearance case. He searches for structure in chaos, meaning in smoke, order in a typographic tornado.

This reader’s profile is a psychological X-ray of existential stubbornness. He is someone who believes that everything stands for something, that no sentence exists by chance, that every word is the key to a hidden door, the lock of which is hidden in the footnote apparatus of a lost postmodern novel. He doesn’t trust a single comma. He suspects every enjambment of intent. He thinks that blank lines are metaphysical breathing spaces. This is not a relaxed reader with a cup of tea. This is a paranoid text detective with bags under his eyes, armed with highlighters and Google Translate.

Yet this reader is not only a victim. He is also a perpetrator. A perpetrator of overinterpretation, of misplaced depth, of literary self-projection. He reads himself into the text. Each labyrinthine sentence is a hall of mirrors in which he chases his own reflections. He is like Narcissus, but with a background in linguistics. And the worst thing is: he knows it. He knows that he is part of a game whose rules he does not understand, but in which he continues to play anyway, because admitting that he does not understand it would feel like intellectual suicide.

There is also something tragicomic in this character. Something touching. Like a man in a three-piece suit trying to skate on a pond of metaphors. He slips, but keeps straightening his tie. He tries again. His analytical ability becomes his safety net, his sarcasm his compass. And every time he thinks: Now I understand, comes a sentence that undermines everything. Because of course. Because that's how it works. Because this is not a text that wants to be read – this is a text that is read must become, by someone who thinks that understanding is a duty.

Maybe that's what's confronting. Not that the text is difficult, but that the reader convinces himself that he has to be able to decipher it. As if there is a secret community of people who do understand what's happening here. And he wants to belong. He wants a seat at that table. He wants to be able to say: “Oh, that use of the syntactically disrupted anaphora is clearly an intertextual nod to the second paragraph of Finnegans Wake.” While he has no idea what he just said. But he hopes no one notices.

And so he plods on. Like a Sisyphus of semantics. His boulder is a sentence that ends in a double meaning. His mountain is a text that refuses to stop. He reads on, he doubts on, he rereads, underlines, googles obscure Latin terms, gets frustrated, comes to a realization, loses it again, and starts over. Not because he is masochistic – although that certainly plays a part – but because he believes somewhere that getting lost is valuable in itself. That wandering, searching, not finding, is perhaps the point. A kind of spiritual IKEA goal without a manual.

Because ultimately, at the end of the labyrinthine journey, there is no minotaur. No central truth. No revelation. Only the mirror. And in that mirror, the reader looks at himself—bags under his eyes, highlighters, hopeful but weary—and wonders if it was worth it. And as he thinks that, he turns around… and reads the whole thing again.

Why? Because that’s what readers who identify with this profile do. Lost, confused, and somehow…damn loyal.