Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
BEN LERNERI think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it’s an antidote to despair.
More Ben Lerner Quotes
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I don’t think it’s always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.
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Maybe that’s the way I’m private – I respect the privacy of “my” characters? Anyway, we’re getting close to the whole “relatability” and “likability” thing.
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Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.
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I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature’s ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
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Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
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I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.
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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. “Ari” appears on the edge of this book a couple of times – but on the edge, she’s never in it, even if she’s a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
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Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do – really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel – was move towards something like sincerity.
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Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
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If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
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Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me – that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art – emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there’s no escape from it, no outside.
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Maybe now if you’re not an exhibitionist you’re private. Or maybe it’s just that for a lot of people – sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways – there’s no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
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I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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The scare quotes burn off like fog.
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