I 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.
BEN LERNEREvery relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
More Ben Lerner Quotes
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
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The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.
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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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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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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’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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The scare quotes burn off like fog.
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I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.
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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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Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
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Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
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Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
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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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When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.
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