Writer's Diary

It's harder to communicate now that people don’t read. One way to look at books is as shorthand—summarizing vast swaths of human experience. Reading a great book is like memorizing all the moves of chess grandmasters, like memorizing Fischer versus Baskin. What happens 200 moves in? Read Tolstoy. What happens if you try to imitate Christ? Read Dostoevsky. What happens when you try to contemplate the infinite? Read Borges. When you try to think about the possibilities of marriage—an erotic, mystical union—read D. H. Lawrence. These are arbitrary examples, but I hope my reader gets the point. Literature is a way to circumvent Kierkegaardian repetition, to keep playing new possibilities in the game of life.