In all things, gray. The pallet nuanced. Indefinite supplants the definite. Melville's river boat passengers in The Confidence Man are shadows, not material, described by the volumes filled. Anti-literature, anti-story, anti-matter. How does the writer retreat from the habit of rendering, in the material of abstraction, the concrete? How does he not fall prey for absoluteness, for accuracy, for truth? To break this taboo, the secular and constant affirmation of "best practices: beginning with details that are concrete, fixed, relevant and absolute presents a catastrophic erasure of the discipline itself. Where does one find the solid if not in the abstract liquid domain of language?

"'I pretend not to divine your meaning there,' said the herb-doctor, after a pause, during which he eyed the Missourian with a kind of pinched expression, mixed of pain and curiosity, as if he grieved at his state of mind and at the same time, wondered what had brought him to it; 'but this much I know,' he added, 'that the general cost of your thoughts is, to say the least, unfortunate.'"