Status Anxiety Definitely Exists At A Political

A Dominant Impulse On Encountering Beauty Is To Wish To Hold On To It, To Possess It And Give It Weight In One’s Life. There Is An Urge To Say, ‘i Was Here, I Saw This And It Mattered To Me.

An Understandable Hunger For Potential Clients Tempts Many [career Counseling Therapists] To Overpromise, Like Creative Writing Teachers Who, Out Of Greed Or Sentimentality, Sometimes Imply That All Of Their Students Could One Day Produce Worthwhile Literature, Rather Than Frankly Acknowledging The Troubling Truth, Anathema To A Democratic Society, That The Great Writer, Like The Contented Worker, Remains An Erratic And Anomalous Event, Immune To The Methods Of Factory Farming.

It Looks Like It’s Wasting Time, But Literature Is Actually The Ultimate Time-saver - Because It Gives Us Access To A Range Of Emotions And Events That It Would Take You Years, Decades, Millennia To Try To Experience Directly. Literature Is The Greatest Reality Simulator - A Machine That Puts You Through Infinitely More Situations Than You Can Ever Directly Witness.

In The Gap Between Who We Wish One Day To Be And Who We Are At Present, Must Come Pain, Anxiety, Envy And Humiliation.

The Only Possible Way To Begin A Book Is To Tell Oneself That Its Eventual Failure Is Guaranteed — But Survivable.