writing

Writers, after all, are drawn to enclosure. Physical boundaries create social experiments, forced encounters, snow-globe microcosms of humanity’s virtues and ills.

Creative writing involves a deliberate rejection of practicality: To get into the right mood for writing requires short-circuiting our usual calculations of profit and loss, since there is nothing as gratuitous as a poem or story.

— Adam Kirsch in The New Republic

Writers serve the public as historians of vibe. What does it feel like to be here, now?