Severance: A Novel

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you

There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

It’s not too bad here if you can stand being alone,

I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.

It is a primitive darkness. It has always been here, after all the city lights have gone out, carrying its own time with the sun.

You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either.

The feeling of walking into a mall before you’ve spent any money, the sense of promise that always diminishes gradually, as you go into the same stores, looking at the same merchandise. You are not accumulating new knowledge. You are remembering, even though you have not set foot in a mall since you were a teenager.

Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.