At This Point, Realism Is Perhaps The

The Search For Pleasure Is Circular, Repetitive, Atemporal. The Variety Seeking Of The Spectator, The Thrill Hunter, The Sexually Promiscuous, Always Ends In The Same Place. It Has An End. It Comes To The End And Has To Start Over. It Is Not A Journey And Return, But A Closed Cycle, A Locked Room, A Cell.

We Have Inhabited Both The Actual And The Imaginary Realms For A Long Time. But We Don't Live In Either Place The Way Our Parents Or Ancestors Did. Enchantment Alters With Age, And With The Age. We Know A Dozen Arthurs Now, All Of Them True. The Shire Changed Irrevocably Even In Bilbo's Lifetime. Don Quixote Went Riding Out To Argentina And Met Jorge Luis Borges There. Plus C'est La Même Chose, Plus ça Change.

...fiction Is Made Out Of The Writer's Experience, His Whole Life From Infancy On, Everything He's Thought And Done And Seen And Read And Dreamed. But Experience Isn't Something You Go And Get - It's A Gift, And The Only Prerequisite For Receiving It Is That You Be Open To It. A Closed Soul Can Have The Most Immense Adventures, Go Through A Civil War Or A Trip To The Moon, And Have Nothing To Show For All That "experience"; Whereas The Open Soul Can Do Wonders With Nothing.

At The Pit's Bottom Is No Anger.

To Think That Realistic Fiction Is By Definition Superior To Imaginative Fiction Is To Think Imitation Is Superior To Invention.