This is the quality of resonance that we’re after, such that the book means one thing to ourselves, and one thing to the next person, and continuing communities of readers are able to project their own meanings onto it, and if you’re really lucky, or really good, continuing generations of readers. Staying in print is really about the ability to continue resonating long after the historical moment in which you made your novel.
“The world goes on forever, the horizon rolls back forever, the earth never rounds into a globe. Travel on and on, you’ll never come back to where you started from, which is not to say that your journey changes you or the time that your journey takes allows for great changes so that your point of departure will, on your return (having traveled for so long in the same direction and coming around the world) be unrecognizable to you. It’s to say that there’s always going to be more and the idea that the world was a single limited globe turns out to be a wildly unlikely mistake.”
Michael Cisco