Everything ends, and Everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all youโve gotโฆand after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and donโt ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.
Ron Currie Jr.All of which raises the question โ your task, burden, privilege, call it what you like โ a question which men and women, great and not-so of every color, creed and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?
Ron Currie Jr.On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years.
Ron Currie Jr.I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain.
Ron Currie Jr.Sometimes we make assumptions about influence when similarities between two writers' work are so strong, but they're still just assumptions. Some things are sort of zeitgeist-y. There's a collective consciousness and we're all drawing from it.
Ron Currie Jr.I think of this a lot in the terms of books. Of course there's a big to-do culturally about e-books versus print books, sales models. The paradigm has changed but my perspective on it is that there's not going to be another paradigm to alight on because everything will continue to evolve so quickly that our brains won't be able to keep up with it.
Ron Currie Jr.I don't know if it's something that we as a species are hardwired for or if it's more of a contemporary phenomenon related to technology and rapid dissemination of data. I did know that whatever its cause or nature, I wanted to interrogate this phenomenon. But the only way for me to do that, the only tool I have to dissect it with, is a fictional narrative.
Ron Currie Jr.