Since, According To Me, Your Life Is

A Work Of Art Is Something Produced By A Person, But Is Not That Person — It Is Of Her, But Is Not Her. It’s A Reach, Really — The Artist Is Trying To Inhabit, Temporarily, A More Compact, Distilled, Efficient, Wittier, More True-seeing, Precise Version Of Herself — One That She Can’t Replicate In So-called ‘real’ Life, No Matter How Hard She Tries. That’s Why She Writes: To Try And Briefly Be More Than She Truly Is.

If You Could Press A Button And Your Ego Investment Was Less, The Toothache Would Be Less. Or Less Tragic At Least.

That's One Of The Reasons I Take A Lot Of Consolation In Fiction. You Have Years To Work On It. I Think That Allows You To Reach For The Best Part Of Your Reader Instead Of A Lot Of The Internet Stuff, In Which You're Kind Of Reaching For The Worst Or The Most Shallow Part Of Your Reader.

As Far As Which Writers Embody This Form Of Gentle Power - Tobias Wolff, For Sure. His Persona And His Writing Both Share An Easy, Capacious Confidence That Says He Has Faith In His Readers.

Vonnegut's War Was Necessary. And Yet It Was Massacre And Screaming And Confusion And Blood And Death. It Was The Mammoth Projection Outward Of The Confused Inner Life Of Men. In War, The Sad Tidy Constructs We Make To Help Us Believe Life Is Orderly And Controllable Are Roughly Thrown Aside Like The Delusions They Are. In War, Love Is Outed As An Insane, Insupportable Emotion, A Kind Of Luxury Emotion, Because Everywhere You Look, Someone Beloved To Someone Is Being Slaughtered, By Someone Whose Own Beloved Has Been Slaughtered, Or Will Be, Or Could Be.