I said that for a long time, I had loved these stories. In part, it was because they had an eternal metaphoric quality that you could use to speak for almost anything in life: love, death, beauty, grief, fate, wars, violence, family, oaths, funerals. I said it was almost like how painters had once used the camera obscura: by looking indirectly at the thing they wanted to focus on, they were sometimes able to see it even more clearly than with their own eyes.
