Loves, hates and unfulfilled desires

Montaigne, who more or less invented the discursive essay, had a method which was highly unmethodical: ‘All arguments are alike fertile to me. I take them upon any trifle . . . Let me begin with that likes me best, for all matters are linked one to another.’ Geoff Dyer could say very much the same thing, and it follows that Zona, though nominally a book about Tarkovsky’s maddening 1979 masterpiece Stalker, goes off in any number of directions. There are other ways of describing a circle than setting out to draw all its tangents, but that is Dyer’s preference.

If the style of approach hasn’t changed, then the cultural context certainly has.

Montaigne could plausibly regard his mind as unexplored territory, but now even the cleverest person’s brain is likely to be closer to a landfill site of dumped and rotting information. In an age of search engines, citations fall like specks of dust rather than points of light.