It's difficult -- maybe impossible -- to write with no consideration for one's audience, present or eventual. The writer's equivalent of a Zen practitioner's pu

It's difficult -- maybe impossible -- to write with no consideration for one's audience, present or eventual. The writer's equivalent of a Zen practitioner's pursuit of "mind like water". "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it." -- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin