Sebald, from an interview:

I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

No longer natural - why do I think this is what allows us to get closer to writing? Closer: because writing is not natural and was never simply an extension of life. Write the words 'it is night' on a piece of paper one evening and by the next morning it is no longer true. Nothing I write here has anything to do with my life. Tyranny of the personal, of the authentic voice. No voice is close to you. Find another voice, an impersonal one. Let it discover itself in you, writing looking for itself through you and finding - only writing, only more occasions for writing.

Unnatural writing - the dream that blogging might permit this as it might interrupt the great circulation of information. There's too much communication. Or only a personal communication according to the general standard of what passes for life, our lives in this time. A new austerity. Speech that withholds itself in speaking. Terseness that guards a gap in speech. Here, I think immediately of This Space, the only 'literary blog' (ridiculous expression) that is necessary.