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Blench not at thy chosen lot.

At their most de-humanizing, the Barthesians see authors as repeating something that has been done before, so that they are rather characterless.

It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they [books] are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. … The other [the language read] is the maturity and experience of that [the language heard]; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.