Magic Is Wild, Dangerous Stuff. You Never

We're Wired To Expect The World To Be Brighter And More Meaningful And More Obviously Interesting Than It Actually Is. And When We Realize That It Isn't, We Start Looking Around For The Real World.

The Idea Of Some Kind Of Objectively Constant, Universal Literary Value Is Seductive. It Feels Real. It Feels Like A Stone Cold Fact That In Search Of Lost Time, By Marcel Proust, Is Better Than A Shore Thing, By Snooki. And It May Be; Snooki Definitely Has More One-star Reviews On Amazon. But If Literary Value Is Real, No One Seems To Be Able To Locate It Or Define It Very Well. We're Increasingly Adrift In A Grey Void Of Aesthetic Relativism.

As A Teenager In Brooklyn Quentin Had Often Imagined Himself Engaged In Martial Heroics, But After This He Knew, As A Cold Immutable Fact, That He Would Do Anything Necessary, Sacrificing Whatever Or Whomever He Had To, To Avoid Risking Exposure To Physical Violence. Shame Never Came Into It. He Embraced His New Identity As A Coward. He Would Run In The Other Direction. He Would Lie Down And Cry And Put His Arms Over His Head Or Play Dead. It Didn't Matter What He Had To Do, He Would Do It And Be Glad.

Escapism Has Value, Even If I Don't Know What Its Value Is, Exactly. Maybe It's Just Part Of Some Healthy Way That We Deal With The World.

It's Time To Live With What We Have And Mourn What We Lost.