A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
I’m a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one’s life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.
Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,’ she says. ‘Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run.
The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.
