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The less time I spend writing, the more time I spend being unhappy. I have a very simple value system: create something better than myself; and because I don’t follow this system very strictly, not anymore, I suffer.
Somehow, I’ve gotten habit of wanting to type up everything I write onto the computer, usually onto Medium. While I do think it’s interesting to respond to a communal demand for new material, the feeling this demand produces in me is mixed: I feel like a garden hose that someone has forgotten to shut off.
If you’re at all interested in literature, find someone to read aloud to, and with. Literature’s only hope lies in the revival of the human voice as an instrument for the transmission of literature. Artforms die when they lose their context, the pressure exerted by a telos, by an external structure. ‘Classical’ music used to be written for a dance, church, a party — witty affairs where people people talked over the music. Poetry, similarly, was written to be memorized and recited. Paintings and statues commemorated something, captured something, for a patron, civic or private. Silent faux-awe is no way to receive or commune with a writer, composer, or artist. We must internalize, share, discuss, enjoy.
What is true is not reducible to what is real. I think Plato was basically right about that. To get out of the cave, you need to fall in love with the…
