It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.

We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.

Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

The novel's not the best form for disposing ideas, though that's one thing it can do. It likely is the best form, though, for conveying the experience of us each being alone, trapped in our skulls with only these bodies and this imperfect instrument of language to convey our state and to find meaning and connection.

There's some evidence that before events of mass trauma, even unpredictable ones, people begin to feel higher anxiety, often expressed in terms specific to the event.