In theory, this narrative method should violate one of the most basic contracts a writer makes with the reader: the promise that what happens to the characters actually does (insofar as the author knows) happen to the characters.
The essay was an attempt, seven years after the novel's publication, to "look back on the book, to see what it did, what it tried to do, and what it might have done insofar as it is a 'feminist' book".
Insofar as we don't — insofar, say, as we are bewildered to find half the newborns in Vienna in 1850 being abandoned — we are likely to construct theories that human nature has changed.
None of them actually do, but insofar as the name sets them apart as iconoclasts, it is accurate.
But the absolutely best life would be a divine one of permanent perfect knowing without the possibility of further learning or any other improvement, and in which there would therefore be no pleasure at all — and presumably we would do well, insofar as we are able, to approximate to this.
Or it might just be that we're all lucky no one can read anyone else's mind, or if they can, that they can only do so insofar as they know their own.
"Apple does research insofar as it advances their laser-focused product aspirations," observes Michael Hawley, a computer scientist who worked for Mr. Jobs at NeXT, a pioneering but commercially unsuccessful computer company.
Dana Milbank did not, insofar as our research could discover, ever criticize any of these Bush events.
And most of Davidson's jokes do no harm (insofar as any comedy does harm).
