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The "messiah" for me, from a Jewish tradition, remains "the yet to be"-- as does art that I attempt in my own writing--and in those yet to be found or "discovered". Not implying here that the artist has anything to do with the "messiah" but I am saying I totally understand the view that the great painting paints itself and the great story writes itself -- as if the creator did not actually do it.

To go on: Walter Benjamin, whom I've read deeply has a quote from one of his more often read pieces that I love. I'll offer it here: “To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through that representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living.” —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, “The Storyteller”

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Enticing thesis about progress. Czechs tend to think in this way: historical ups and downs with no hope of a golden age. As a man I think similarly: every age would have had its benefits and tradeoffs. It’s harder to think this way about my daughters, by which I mean that their lives in America would have been vastly different before 1920, and that I'm not sure they or I can regard that earlier period as no better or worse than the period where they could vote, own property, and so on. I’m also uncertain about whether the Anthropocene is just another collapse, as per Jared Diamond, or whether some of these historical and cultural changes are more irrevocable? But I hear you on the impoverished aesthetics of this strain of progressivism. Dystopian climate activists are as humorless as Prohibitionists.

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