The Wrong End of the Telescope

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you’ll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.

When the pirates threw young Arion overboard, the dolphins carried him and his lyre to the safety of shore. But not Baris. Where have the dolphins gone? Where the gods?

In one of your essays, you wrote that a novelist had to be able to "sit with the not-knowing," which was not something I was comfortable with.

What is life if not a habitation to loss?

Why is it that you live in such a safe place yet consider the world so dangerous?" "I'm an American.

She wished you were there to comfort him, but what could you do? What could you do? You were in graduate school. You had to get another degree in order to become a productive member of an evil society. You gobbled up hamburgers and quenched your thirst with Coke. You dove into gay sex clubs every night. You were assimilating, for crying out loud. You did not wish to remain an outsider in your adopted country. How could you explain to your father that you were not coming back, that you were choosing to become a citizen of the country that destroyed his dream with a single sixteen-inch shell? Which side were you on?

He said you used him as a narrator, an interpreter of stories. I liked that term. I wondered if that was how you interacted with those around you. You wanted people's stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

What breaks us is rarely what we expect.

Writing one’s story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

Why is it that you live in such a place yet consider the world so dangerous?" "I'm an American.

You had to get another degree in order to become a productive member of an evil society.

You wanted people’s stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.