And the music—the music in one’s head—is always changing. And that music went beyond hip-hop. I saw it in all the reading I was doing—even now the sentences come back to me, haunting me as sure as any MC. I think of Ulysses S. Grant speaking of poor Southern whites—“They too needed emancipation”; Edith Wharton sighing at the naïveté of her hero—“Oh my dear—Where is that country?”; E. L. Doctorow expressing the motivating desires of his protagonist’s occupation—“I report, that is my profession, I report as a loud noise testifies to a gun”; George Eliot on the storyteller’s mission—“All the
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