So, we have an accepted hierarchy of fictional types, with "literary fiction," not defined, but consisting almost exclusively of realism, at the top. All other kinds of fiction, the "genres," are either listed in rapidly descending order of inferiority or simply tossed into a garbage heap at the bottom. This judgmental system, like all arbitrary hierarchies, promotes ignorance and arrogance. It has seriously deranged the teaching and criticism of fiction for decades, by short-circuiting useful critical description, comparison, and assessment. It condones imbecilities on the order of "If it's science fiction it can't be good, if it's good it can't be science fiction."

And judgment by genre is particularly silly and pernicious now that the idea of genre is itself breaking down.

That's the other problem with our good tool; the screwdriver is melting, the screws are all screwy. Much of the best fiction doesn't fit into the genres any more, but combines crosses, miscegenates, transgresses, and reinvents them.

"We should look at our current condition of national borders and we should imagine a more just world where these borders would be markers of culture and identity, valuable but easily crossed, rather than legal borders designed to keep our national identities rigid and ready for conflict and war, separating us from others. ...

If this global community has not been achieved, it is not be because it is a wholly utopian fantasy, a nowhere not marked by any boundary. There have been moments in our history--and many times in our writing and our folklores and our theologies--where we have achieved the best of ourselves in our ability to welcome the other, to clothe the stranger, to feed the hungry, to open our homes. This is what we need to remember as we hope and work for a future where borders do not matter, but people do. This is the kind of memory, the memory of our own humanity, and our inhumanity, that writers can offer."

Words, once uttered, remain open like doors, we nearly always enter, but sometimes we wait outside, expecting some other door to open, some other words to be uttered..."

From his windows bare of drapes Ricardo Reis watched the river's expanse. To get a better view he switched off the light. Gray light fell like pollen from the skies, becoming darker as it settled. Ferry boats to and from Cacilhas, their lamps already lit, plied the dingy water alongside the warships and anchored barges. One last frigate, almost concealed behind the outline of the rooftops, is about to dock. The scene reminds you of a child's drawing. The evening is so sad that a desire to weep surges from the depths of the soul. His head resting against the windowpane, shut off from the world by a cloud of condensation as he breathes on the smooth, cold surface, we watches the contorted defiant figure of Adamastor gradually dissolve. It was already dark when Ricardo Reis went out. He dined in a restaurant in the Rua dos Correeiros, on a mezzanine floor with a low ceiling, solitary among solitary men.

Labyrinth and Choice
The labyrinth is someone's fossilized hesitation.
The most oppressive thing about the labyrinth is that you are constantly being forced to choose. It isn't the lack of an exit, but the abundance of "exits" that is so disorienting. Of course, the city is the most obvious labyrinth. Barthes points to Paris as a model: "the labyrinths of the center and the outskirts built by Haussmann."

I write in the first person to make sure that I'm still alive.
I write in the third person to make sure I'm not just a projection of my own self, that I'm three-dimensional and have a body. Sometimes I nudge a glass and note with satisfaction that it falls and breaks. So I do still exist and cause consequences.
If no one is watching me, then I'll have to watch myself, so as not to turn into quantum soup.

Without being able to formulate it clearly, he senses taht if no one remembers, then everything is permissible. If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted. God will turn out to be nothing but a huge memory. A memory of sins. A cloud with infinite megabytes of memory. A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer's, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime.

But the movement made no allowances; it rolled unyieldingly towards its goal, piling up the corpses of the drowned wherever it changed course. And its course consisted of nothing but bends, according to its dictates. And according to its dictates, those unable to follow its meandering way needed to be flushed out onto the bank. The movement had no interest in individual reasons, motives or morals; it was indifferent to what went on in any one person's head and heart. It recognized one crime only, deviating from the course, and only one punishment--death. Death itself was devoid of mystery, it had no sublime aspect; within the movement it was merely the logical consequence of political divergence.

The oldest man in our town had died the previous year. He'd been ninety-four, born in the nineteenth century, long before televisions were invented. My brother and I occasionally did his shopping, at our mother's request. He loved tinned green beans and full-cream quark. During the Second World War, he'd gone into hiding and afterwards had become a xenophobe. His petition was the reason there was no centre for asylum seekers in our town. My brother and I hadn't known this wen we'd asked him how to put an end to all the wars in the world. We suspected he'd lived long enough to have an opinion on that. He answered that as far as he was concerned, all the bush people who lived in the desert should just wipe each other out. This was shocking to me, because if the oldest person I knew understood even less about the world than I did, then how was it possible that other adults had all the answers? And what was the point of living longer if you weren't going to get any wiser? Even my brother didn't have an answer for that.

And I also believe that such lines of thought attend not only my own efforts, but those of other lyric poets in the younger generation. They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless, in this till now undreamt-of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, stricken by and seeking reality.

The book in my hand is The New York Trilogy. Auster: hermetic but nimble, both simple and twisted, at once paranoid and crystalline, and with an open sky between every word. ... Auster turned into a true north of mine when came to both reading and writing, even after I forgot about him and stopped reading his new books as they came out. His discerning simplicity became an ideal, initially associated with his name though it endured on its own. Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

"Enlarge art? No. To the contrary: go with art into your innermost narrows. And set yourself free.
Does one take, when thinking of poems, does one take such routes with the poems? Are these routes only re-routings, detours from you to you? But they are also at the same time, among many other routes, routes on which language becomes voice, they are encounters, routes of a voice to a perceiving you, creaturely routes, blueprints for being perhaps, a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself ... A kind of homecoming."

Why a love that has to be kept secret can make a person so much happier than one that can be talked about is something she wishes she could understand... Perhaps because a secret is not expended on the present, but keeps its full force for the future. Or is it something to do with the potential for destruction that one suddenly has?

Is it called no-man's-land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who he is?

'If something unprecedented does exist in the vent,' I said to Felix, as we made our way back upstairs, 'there's no guarantee we'd acknowledge it. Even if it moves right past us.'

I dwelled on this as I waited out on deck, watching the activity. I questioned what else I had already missed so far, in my own life, simply through the limits of my character. If we were blind to anything representing a new category, then our individual histories might have amounted to a series of glancing encounters with unspeakable wonders--as a general summation, it felt about right. Life as a repeated failure to apprehend something. Coming close then veering away again, sensing this unnamable category, music heard distantly through a series of doors, a dull, echoing bass, a sound hitting your body.

The rendezvous was the Myrtle Bank Hotel. Wormold had not been to Jamaica for many years, and he was appalled by the dirt and the heat. What accounted for the squalor of the British possessions? The Spanish, the French and the Portuguese built cities where they settled, but the English just allowed cities to grow. The poorest street in Havana had dignity compared with the shanty-life of Kingston -- huts built out of old petrol-tins roofed with scrap-metal purloined from some cemetery of abandoned cars.

"Generations have viewed the history of America without understanding let alone appreciation of the continent's original inhabitants, while educational avenues remain hazardous to Indian students. Against such obstacles, the field of Indian history operates.

Yet this is a central battleground for a larger struggle, a contest for reconciliation, if not for coexistence and redemption. Much like a family bereft by tragedy, a nation unable to confront its past will surely compromise any sense of a shared civic culture. National histories need to be shared by all, not imposed from above, and finding ways of celebrating the endurance as well as ascendancy of contemporary Indian people appears a thread from which to weave potentially broader narratives."

All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.

Don't you understand? There is only battle, the one against lies and half truths, against compromise, the old stuff! But we let ourselves be trapped by their rhetoric and instead of fighting against it we fought for it. We believed that it was all for the future! But it was against the future! Our future is dead, because the young men who carried that future are dead. We are just the remnants, what's left over! Think about it! A generation full of hope, belief, will, strength, and ability, all hypnotised into shooting one another down, even though they all had the same goals in all the different countries!

I've been running around everywhere, knocking on all the doors of my youth and wanting to get back in, thinking that they would be bound to let me in, because I'm still young, after all, and wanted so much to forget. But everything has drifted away like a mirage, broken up without a sound, crumbled like dry tinder when I touched it but couldn't get hold of it. Surely here there should be something left, I kept on trying, and made myself ridiculous and that made me sad--but now I see that an unseen and silent war had raged over the landscape of memory, too, and that it would be stupid of me to go on searching. The time between then and now is like a huge abyss, I can't go back and there is nothing else for it, I have to go forward, marching somewhere, I don't know where.

But now he ceased to make an adventure of eating and drinking. He did not explore his new world. He did not turn his cave into a home or keep a record of the passage of the days. There was nothing to look forward to but the sight, every morning, of the shadow of the rim of the mountain chasing faster and faster towards him till all of a sudden he was bathed in sunlight. He would sit or lie in a stupor at the mouth of the cave, too tired to move or perhaps too lackadaisical. There were whole afternoons he slept through. He wondered if he were living in what was known as bliss.

......

He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding his own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man, though he is older than me by most reckonings.

"For a moment nobody's talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. And my mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can't see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the kid's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frightens the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop--will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to them and their kinfolk.

But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won't talk any more that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a little closer to the darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they won't talk any more because if he knows too much about what's happened to them he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him."

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done."
And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all of this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
And He went away.

"When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages--a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to the shelf. ...

A deserted library in the morning--there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting quietly. I want to do what I can to preserve this place, keep it neat and tidy. Sometimes I come to a halt and gaze at all the silent books on the stacks, reach out and touch the spines of a few."