‘Littérature, ou – la vengeance de “l’esprit de l’escalier”’, formulated Paul Valéry: let's call literature the revenge of ‘staircase wit’, or ‘the spirit of the staircase’, ‘a retort or remark that occurs to a person after the opportunity to make it has passed’ when already you’ve left the hot salon or saloon, descending to your coat, the door, the chill air of the way home thinking of that thing you might have said, if only you had said it. But writing, Valéry's aperçu suggests, means always being able to say it: get home, pick up the pencil, sit at the typewriter, open the laptop, make it new, and again, and again there will be time for the last word (even if that mot, like Valéry’s, is going to fake a retake, or – a correction). Revenge is a fifth draft best served chilled, a revision can always trump a vision, and the literary world becomes a party where everyone's always already perfectly poised out here on the staircase all the time, saying our if onlys.

Reading them, too. Valéry's next aphorism considers ‘Le plaisir ou l’ennui causé à un lecteur de 1912 par un livre écrit en 1612’ – the enjoyment or annoyance sparked in the reader of a book written three centuries ago – and in doing so points to the way in which his eternal staircase is above all the haunt of readers who are all of us esprits de l’escalier, will not ever have been there when it happened and the brilliant re hit the mark or the page or the presses, but compensatingly have had and will have all the time in the world to make it out. Our thoughts all are afterthoughts, but look,