remedies for the mind

Of course, today I have small quiet places where I can gather myself—but I still feel that the idea is slightly ridiculous. I’ve described women at moments when they are absolutely alone. But in their heads there is never silence or even focus. The most absolute solitude, at least in my experience, and not just narrative experience, is always, to paraphrase the title of a very good book by Hrabal, too loud. To the writer, no person is ever definitively relegated to silence, even if we long ago broke off relations with that person—out of anger, by chance, or because the person died. I can’t even think without the voices of others, much less write. And I’m not talking only about relatives, female friends, enemies. I’m talking about others, men and women who today exist only in images: in television or newspaper images, sometimes heartrending, sometimes offensive in their opulence. And I’m talking about the past, about what we generally call tradition; I’m talking about all those others who were once in the world and who have acted or who now act through us. Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. And we should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection—I call it a tangle, or, rather, frantumaglia—to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it. In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.

The litany helped clarify the stakes for Jackson’s work. It is undeniable that the rise of the so-called meritocratic elite has cleared the way for certain exceptional members of recently oppressed minorities to operate, and sometimes even succeed, at the highest levels of American society. What it has so far failed to deliver — what it was never, perhaps, quite engineered to ensure — is a full sense of arrival. Of belonging. And in this country whose heart has always been moved, perhaps inordinately so, by a phrase nicely turned, it might just be that art — argumentative, confrontational art; art obsessed with a fair hearing of the truth — is the vessel through which this hope might be realized.

This was a time in my life when I was so filled with longing for so many things that were so far out of reach that at least once a day I thought my heart would implode from the sheer force of unrequited desire.

We’ve become really dangerously entitled as an audience, and I feel like this is a unique kind of violation. A lot of reality stars have pushed the audience to believe that everything a celebrity has, they’re entitled to witness, and that’s just not true. Especially in the case of women in this industry. It’s very hard to be a woman in this industry. You look at someone like Jennifer Lawrence who’s already — literally — laid herself bare. And then we’re not satisfied. We want to see the private moments, we want to see the pictures that aren’t meant for us, the stuff that she took herself, because it’s not enough for us. That’s a fucked-up axiom to take on. I think theft is theft, and if you are peeking through somebody’s window and photographing them or stealing pictures off their phone, that’s stealing, and I don’t know when stealing became okay. But somehow because it’s celebrity, and because we’re all titillated by naked human beings, we’re all like, Oh, yeah, that’s acceptable. They owe us that. I just don’t think that’s right. You’re talking about a different generation. You’re talking about a generation that was born inside social media. Look at the way that kids are representing themselves to each other. They give everything: They’re videotaping themselves, they’re photographing themselves; their every moment is shared with one another. So that’s a generation that doesn’t even understand the notion of withholding, the notion of modesty. But it’s just like anything, you just gotta educate people. Human beings are inherently decent, and if you correct them, you’ll take that course.

“This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.