What kept Vasili so small all his life? (What is keeping us so small now?) He wasn’t small, actually, as proven by his end. He was infinite. He had access to as much great love as any of our beloved spiritual heroes. Why did he live out his life in that small country of selfishness? What was it that finally jolted him out of it? Well, it was truth.

We don’t have to become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction. We don’t have to swear off our powers or repent of who we are or what we like to do or are good at doing. Those are our horses; we just have to hitch them to the right, uh, sled.

That’s the kind of story I want to write, the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.

We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.

What a story is “about” is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

But this quality is what we love him for now. In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another. —

The story form asks of the merely anecdotal: “Yeah, but so what?”