In everyday life, we seldom fully focus on conjunctions like these, any more than we focus on the word “and.” Yet multiple simultaneous experiences and emotions are so common that by the time we reach adulthood, the very fabric of our life is made of patchwork. We know by then that the world is full of beauty and grandeur and also wretchedness and suffering; we know that people are kind and funny and brilliant and brave and also petty and irritating and horrifically cruel. In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, “Life is and.” He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a
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