No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

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.

Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains.

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.

I have a high opinion of story. I see it as the essential trajectory of narrative: a coherent, onward movement, taking the reader from Here to There. Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story. Story goes. Plot elaborates the going.

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

The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?

Capitalism thinks it’s adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit. We are therefore at very high risk.

The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it?

To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such. But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare” time?