My Dream Has Always Been

We Will Live With Racism For Ever. But Senses Of Self, Senses Of Belonging, Senses Of Us And Of Others? Those Are Up For Grabs.

Time Passes, As The Novelist Says. The Single Most Useful Trick Of Fiction For Our Repair And Refreshment: The Defeat Of Time. A Century Of Family Saga And A Ride Up An Escalator Can Take The Same Number Of Pages. Fiction Sets Any Conversion Rate, Then Changes It In A Syllable. The Narrator’s Mother Carries Her Child Up The Stairs And The Reader Follows, For Days. But World War I Passes In A Paragraph. I Needed 125 Pages To Get From Labor Day To Christmas Vacation. In Six More Words, Here’s Spring.

This Idea That A Book Can Either Be About Character And Feeling, Or About Politics And Idea, Is Just A False Binary. Ideas Are An Expression Of The Feelings And The Intense Emotions We Hold About The World.

The Job Of Taste Was To Thin The Insane Torrent Of Human Creativity Down To Manageable Levels. But The Job Of Appetite Was Never To Be Happy With Taste.

We Don't Consider The Roles That We're Taking In Making The World The Way It Is.