I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.