Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

come, you talk to me. You and I have our little conversation. Then I need to go do my class and am thinking about that, then you’re thinking about the phone. Then you and I go to the class. God knows what you’re doing in the class. Now we’re here. Now you’re in a good mood ’cause you’ve mailed this thing off, that because of your relationship with these various other webs and commitments—
    I mean, it’s more as if—Life seems to strobe on and off for me, and to barrage me with input. And that so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it. In a way that—maybe I’m very naïve—I imagine Leo getting up in the morning, pulling on his homemade boots, going out to chat withthe serfs whom he’s freed [making clear he knows something about the texture and subject], you know. Sitting down in his
silent
room, overlooking some very well-tended gardens, pulling out his quill, and … in deep tranquility, recollecting emotion.
    And I don’t know about you. I just—stuff that’s like that, I enjoy reading, but it doesn’t feel
true
at all. I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from the fact that, I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those out, you know?
    And yet you made a linear narrative, easily, out of both our days, just now. Off the top of your head. I think our brain is structured to make linear narratives, to condense and focus and separate what’s important
.
    You, if this is an argument, you will win. This is an argument you will win. [Strange: competition.] I am attempting to describe for you what I mean in response to your, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    What always strikes me is the opposite: the lack of
discontinuity,
not the lack of continuity
.
    Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn’t really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I’m not defending it, I’m saying that stuff—this is gonna get very abstract—but there’s a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There’s maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of
capturing
, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell “Another sensibility like mine
exists.”
Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely. [“Lonely” again; interesting.]
    There’s really really shitty avant-garde, that’s coy and hard for its own sake. That I don’t think it’s a big accident that a lot of what, if you look at the history of fiction—sort of, like, if you look at the history of painting after the development of photography—that the history of fiction represents this continuing struggle to allow fiction to continue to do that magical stuff. As the texture, as the
cognitive
texture, of our lives changes. And as, um, as the different media by which our lives are represented change. And it’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it.
    And the reason why I’m angry at how shitty most of it is, and how much it ignores the reader, is that I think it’s very very very very precious. Because it’s the stuff that’s about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.
    [Deep, reverse-belch breath]
    I don’t know about you: My life and my self doesn’t feel like anything like a unified developed character in a linear narrative to me. I may be mentally ill, maybe you’re not. But my
guess
is, looking at things like MTV videos or new fashions in ads, with more and more flash cuts, or the use of computer metaphors which would only be useful metaphors if the