How to Set a Fire and Why

by Jesse Ball

First thing I do when I get in a library is—I go to the stacks and nose around. The idea is—you don’t know what you’re interested in. That’s why it’s possible to be surprised. So, instead of looking for things in particular, you look for what you didn’t know you liked, and then when you find it you know that you liked it, and then you are a broader person than you were before.

I think 75 percent of people hate it, but the other 25 adore it. What else is like that? Trampolines? Tanning salons? Parrots?

Whoever’s calm and sensible is insane.

why do we as humans refuse to recognize that a life has fixed proportions and can’t go beyond itself? Why do we allow people to be blown up into monstrous caricatures of celebrity that extend to such grotesque lengths that they efface our lives, the only lives that are real? In other words—the existence of Hitlers makes you putting your shoe on a bit trivial. But it isn’t trivial at all, it’s your shoe!

That’s what the world is—we pass beyond things, and they grow dark to us, and one day we can no longer see them, not even the outlines.