Sublime

I watched the lives of others with a sense of wistfulness. I missed the burn of Scotch in my throat, the loose joy of a dinner party where everyone got a little high on talk. I wanted to be sloppy and fun again. “How are you doing?” Gina asked one morning. “I don’t know if I can take this anymore,” I told her. “I just want to get better. I want to

I did not see that I was in good company: an entire culture had been seduced. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.

Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star, a flashback to a time when writers could be, more than simply respected or well regarded, famous.

Locked in the terrifying prison of one’s neuroses, where the increasingly narrowing paths to liberation always seem to invoke the language of individual healing, flourishing or self-improvement (therapy is wonderful, but it’s strange that a private, commodified exchange seems to have become synonymous with practising a public ethics of care), the m

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.

So much of the world is not made by people, and paying attention to that is important to me.”

I had come to New York five years earlier, to create a life for myself there. I had not created a life for myself there. I had wanted to find the emerging writers and thinkers of my generation. I had found the sycophants, careerists, and media parasites who were redefining mediocrity for the 21st century.