Lawrence Weshler, letter to William Shawn after he solicited fiction [via Wondercab Mini]

...the part of my sensibility which I demonstrate in nonfiction makes fiction an impossible mode for me. That’s because for me the world is already filled to bursting with interconnections, interrelationships, consequences, and consequences of consequences. The world-as-it-is is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation. That’s what my reporting becomes about: taking any single knot and worrying out the threads, tracing the interconnections, following the mesh through into the wider, outlying mesh, establishing the proper analogies, ferreting out the false strands. If I were somehow to be forced to write a fiction about, say, a make-believe Caribbean island, <https://substack.com/redirect/568ed66d-b92c-45e4-8a5d-ac0187da5624?j=eyJ1IjoiN2dueTIifQ.kl4KzAsqc2VOgMgVHh0d0xHCdE2eDfTFP_FYh7mBzUc> I wouldn’t know where to put it, because the Caribbean as it is is already full—there’s no room in it for any fictional islands. Dropping one in there would provoke a tidal wave, and all other places would be swept away. I wouldn’t be able to invent a fictional New York housewife, because the city as it is is already overcrowded—there are no apartments available, there is no more room in the phone book. (If, by contrast, I were reporting on the life of an actual housewife, all the threads that make up her place in the city would become my subject, and I’d have no end of inspiration, no lack of room. Indeed, room—her specific space, the way the world makes room for her—would be my theme.)

Louise Gluck, Telemachus' Detachment

When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also i insane. Also very funny.

Tomas Transtromer’s “Sentry Duty,” Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly [via Lawrence Weschler]

Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation does some work on itself.

…

 

Ursula K. Lee Guin, A Wizard of Earths [via @carsonellis]

"I am yours, by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant. When I am free to come back I will come back: till then farewell."

Ben Lerner, 10:04

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.