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For most of my reading life, mimetic realism was the admired mode of literature among critics, reviewers, and professors. The various literatures of the fantastic, those tales which prioritize the writer’s imagination above lived experience, have been, for reasons unclear to me, suspect—either childish or escapist or lacking in subtlety or deficient in characterization.
The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.
All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.
The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
She was wrong—I thought she was wrong—but I didn’t correct her. People trivialize or simplify data for so many reasons.
Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it now.
That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
My mom once so out of it that she poured orange juice into my cereal instead of milk. My dad’s incessant, nervous chatter, which made him seem perpetually guilty of something.
Sacrifices didn’t need names.
some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing …
There was something about my mood and its dark glow that eclipsed sense,
waves. When I continued, it was with a kind of numbed awareness that there might be more revelations still to absorb,
“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”
