No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is—more than any other kind of writing—subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.

any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous,

Fantasy not only asks “What if things didn’t go on just as they do?” but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.

Old age is for anybody who gets there. Warriors get old; sissies get old. In fact it’s likely that more sissies than warriors get old. Old age is for the healthy, the strong, the tough, the intrepid, the

Wanting to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality. With all good intentions, people say to me, “Oh, you’re not old!”

Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.

I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be “interactive,” that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it

that it was all about hoarding vs. gobbling, or the necessity of choice when there is no middle way.

What relates my small refusal to Sartre’s big one is the sense that to accept an award from an institution is to be co-opted by, embodied as, the institution.