Pope Francis

“If we destroy creation, creation will destroy us. Never forget this!”

-- Pope Francis

Buff

Buff urges me to go to Europe for a year, that it would really change my attitude. But he doesn’t get that I’m a runty, ugly-as-fuck injun, and there is no place on earth that can make that good. And I’m old now anyway; even if salvation was at hand, there is nothing left to save. The only thing left for me is to die in my misery.

Of the Novel

There is considerable mourning these days about the waning of the novel as an art form. No one thinks it will die and disappear, but it is no longer the main show, so to speak. Presumably, the novel will always have its lovers, so long as people hunger for some stirring sense of the wonder of life, when they are unable to feel that in their own real lives.

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More than with any other form of art, the relationships we have with novels are apt to approach the kind we have with people. For a long time, novels were typically named after people (Tom Jones, Emma, Jane Eyre), but that is not the crux of it. What makes our experience of novels so personal is not that they have protagonists, but that they have narrators. Paintings and photographs don’t, and neither, with rare (and usually unfortunate) exception, do movies or plays. Novels bring another subjectivity before us; they give us the illusion of being addressed by a human being.

They are also exceptionally good at representing subjectivity, at making us feel what it’s like to inhabit a character’s mind. Film and television, for all their glories as narrative and visual media, have still not gotten very far in that respect, nor is it easy to see how they might. The camera proposes, by its nature, an objectivist aesthetic; its techniques are very crude for representing that which can’t be seen, the inner life.

-- William Deresiewicz at The Atlantic

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