Préface d’Erewhon, nouvelle édition

€ Et maintenant, Monsieur, vous allez créerl », meaning that I had been looking long enough at other people’s work and should now do something of my own.

» This sankinto me and pained me; for I knew I had done nothing as yet, nor had I any definite notion of what I wanted to do. AÏl was vague aspiration, admiration, and despair; nor did I yet know, though I was fully 34 years old, that the study of other men’s works — except by the way — is the surest manner of killing the power to do things for oneself.

« Vous allez créer. » Yes, but how to create? and what? I had not yet, for all my education, got to know that doing is the sole parent of doing, and creating a little the only way of learning howto create more; still, I went home resolved to do at any rate something in literature, if not in painting?. »

Ce « quelque chose » allait être Erewhon.