Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is fluid, unpredictable, dangerous. It leaps and surges and doubles back, cuts unpredictable channels, surfaces suddenly in places no one would expect.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however, is ultimately beside the point. They're building it. And in the friction-free future, jacked into paradise, we'll have the 'liberty' of living (or rather, or buying the illusion of living), through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly omnipotent as god himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is difficult to imagine.

Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak, you don’t. What decides why one thing gets picked to be the way it will be? Accident? Fate? Some weakness in ourselves? Forget your harps, your tin-foil angels—the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers.