The Ecstasy of Influence part 2

Throughout this essay Lethem talks a lot about how plagiarism is a disadvantage to writers. He thinks that when somebody re-uses somebodies work it loses some of the emotion and meaning that the original author was using when he wrote it. It does because the author who is taking something from another author doesn't know how the persons felt when they were writing it. They don't know the felling behind the writing and they might change the meaning behind what the author wanted it to mean.

"But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place."

What Lethem is trying to say with this paragraph is that with the artists on one side and corporations on the other that it is hard to make up new ideas and that it forces use to use other authors ideas to make our own work.