Larger.

The act of writing is like a boy hoeing a field of corn on a hot day, from which he can see either a woodlot or, more often, an immense forest where he'd rather be. This is uncomplicated, almost banal. He had to hoe the corn in order to be allowed to reach his beloved forest. This can be easily extrapolated into a writer as a small god who has forty acres as a birthright on which to reinvent the world. He cultivates this world, but then there is always something vast and unreachable beyond his grasp, whether it's the forest, the ocean, or the implausible ten million citizens of New York or Paris. While he hoes or writes, he whirls toward the future at a rate that with age becomes quite incomprehensible. He leaves a trail of books, but he really marks the passage of time by the series of hunting dogs he's left behind. His negative capability has made the world grow larger rather than shrink, and not a single easy answer has survived the passing of years.

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