ABSTRACT
The human mind resembles a nuclear reactor: amazingly generative within the little containment dome, but always at risk of running fatally amok in a meltdown, and ceaselessly producing toxic waste. Art is a name for the technologies which allow us to reprocess that seeming waste into fuel for trips whose purpose is both business and pleasure. Epistemological overreach is the equivalent, in a moment of time, of refusing mortality across the span of time: knowing the present completely feels like an eternal consciousness. Denial of mortality bonds a social collective together, and recognitions of mortality can unsettle that collective’s project, as Don Delillo’s White Noise and even Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” can be read to suggest. Fictional stories provide individual and collective benefits beyond those offered by other kinds of prudential hypothetical thought. Aesthetics derive partly from evolutionary incentives: identify and attract the healthiest mate, find a livable setting, avoid the most dangerous parasites.
