A book is the vegetal pulp left behind by man. And now, after countless centuries of digging up and studying palimpsests and engraved tablets, they’re saying that we should just allow those dead, abandoned cities to become buried again beneath the windblown sentiment…
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“I had a wonderful conference yesterday with a graduate student who told me, among other things, that writers write for emotional reasons, and I said No, writers do not write for emotional reasons — they write because they want to make something. I asked her if she knew the Stephen Sondheim musical with the number about making a hat — “a hat, a hat, I made a hat where there never was a hat.” That’s so moving to me I choke up when I tell you about it, and I said that’s what writing is about, that’s what all art is about: you’ve made a hat where there never was a hat! That’s why people write. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s how I try to engage students to get out of this one-on-one, tit-for-tat realism: make a thing that never was.”
Stanley Elkin