The title comes from Yitzchak Luria: Writing is impossible because all things are related. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received, and how can I put it down in a book? Rather than interpreting that as a cry of despair, or an expression of mystical awe (which is how the good rabbi consciously intended it), Tom Bradley has accepted Luria's utterance as a challenge. Allowing the "sea to burst its dams and overflow," acknowledging that "all things are related," he has refused to find writing impossible, and has put it down in this book about writing itself.