I'm not even sure if empathy is an act, it could be a disposition.

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

Trauma, and certain important experiences, can imprint on us at a genetic level.

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.

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.

Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.