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, endlessly winding, 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 us give him a name for convenience, perhaps something clumsy, 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 missing persons case. He searches for structure in chaos, meaning in smoke, order in a typographic tornado. The profile of this reader is a psychological X-ray of existential stubbornness.