ABSTRACT
Literature does many things: one of them – an important one – is process trauma. But it is hard to make sense of traumatic experiences while living through them. The general rule is lots of bad art immediately; and then some good stuff, with depth and perspective, starting a decade or so on. Literature is a vaccine; it injects an exquisitely tiny, artificial version of the terrible truth of life into the people system. The writer’s curse (one of the writer’s curses – there are many) is that everything is material. It can be hard not to disengage from the moment, step outside the people mind and their feelings, and float above it all, taking notes.
