Here’s what literature means to me, and why it appeals to me, roughly in order of priority:
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It’s ambitious. It’s a chance, in a kind of test with your maker, to state in a contained way who you are and what you care about.
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It’s socially non-contingent. It uses language but none of the other tools of social attachment. Writers and readers are temporarily extracted from their social roles and face each other in a peculiarly disembodied, as well as freeing, way.
