This

"... they serve the vital and vanishing function of reminding us of fiction's limitless possibilities for reach and grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, and for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion and entertainment-marketing seem increasingly consummatable only in the imagination." -- DFW on David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress and other philosophical novels.