Writing is routinely described as “creative”–this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I tech should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience–mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious–rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance. Which can be a handsome, and sometimes even a useful, activity–on the page. But, in my experience, turns out to be a pretty hopeless practice for real life. (6)
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“I wish we could have our old life back.” … A desire which, when I heard it–and found its bleating echo in myself–I’ll admit I weighed in my hand, for a moment, like a shiy apple. It sounded like a decent “wartime” wish, war being the analogy he’s chosen to use. But no one in 1945 wished to return to the “old life,” to return to 1939–except to resurrect the dead. Disaster demanded a new dawn. Only new thinking can lead to a new dawn. We know that. (11)
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The devil is consistent, if nothing else. I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms. (12)
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Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole, preferring instead to attack death as a series of discrete problems. (13)
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Maybe this is why plagues–being considered insufficiently hierarchical in nature, too inattentive to income disparity–were long ago relegated to history in the American imagination, or to other continents. … A plague it is, but American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making, are not so easily overturned. (14-15)
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War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate. (16)
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The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity–and to time itself. It is something to do, yes, but when it is done, and whether it is done at all, is generally considered a question for artists alone. (21)
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The crisis has taken this familiar division between the time of art and the time of work and transformed it. Now there are essential workers–who do not need to seek out something to do; whose task is vital and unrelenting–and there are the rest of us, all with a certain amount of time on our hands. … The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in it. (22-23)
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Isn’t it the case that everybody finds their capabilities returning to them, even if it’s only the capacity to mourn what we have lost? We had delegated so much. (23-24)
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There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love. … Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through–that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly. Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with love. If it weren’t for this habit of indirection, of course, there would be no culture in this world, and very little meaningful pleasure for any of us. (26-27)
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You start to think of contempt as a virus. … Has America metabolized contempt? Has it lived with the virus so long that it no longer fears it? Is there a strong enough desire for a different America within America? Real change would involve a broad recognition that the fatalistic, essentialist race discourse we often employ as a superficial cure for the symptoms of this virus manages, in practice, to smoothly obscure the fact that the DNA of this virus is economic at base. (81)
