Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.

I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.

[Antinatalism ] seems to oppose the idea of writing anything at all. To reproduce is to pass on genes. To write is to pass on memes. In that sense, it really is a kind of reproduction, which antinatalism should, theoretically, oppose, or at least which I feel that it opposes emotionally in my own experience.

I never went to church as a child. I did not .

Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

The cultural products of America from this period [ fifties and sixties] are like a vision of paradise or something. I find it utterly intoxicating.

On the other hand, the seventies were drab. That is, I am utterly fascinated by the fifties and sixties.