A Letter Makes Ordinary Things Seem Important.

I Do Have An Impulse To Sort Of Leverage What I Say Against Something I Disagree With.

I Sometimes Am Discouraged By What Seems To Be A Sort Of Conventional Disparagement Of Humankind. I Think Often People Feel That They Are Doing Something Moral When They Are Doing That, But That's Not How I Understand Morality. I Much Prefer The "everyone Is Sacred, And Everybody Errs" Model Of Reality.

Characters More Or Less Present Themselves To Me. I Don't Know Their Origins. I Think If I Did, If I Seemed To Myself To Fabricate Them, I Could Not Induce Suspension Of Disbelief In Myself In The Way Writing Fiction Requires.

When The Reformation Became Established, One Of The Things That Was A Question Between Catholicism And The Reformation Traditions Was Whether There Was A Hierarchy Of Being. If You Look At Thomas Aquinas, For Example, You Have Hierarchies Of Angels And All The Rest Of It, And Hierarchies Even Of Saints And Then Subsaints - People Who Aren't Quite There, That Sort Of Thing. The Reformation Rejected All Of That And Created A New Metaphysics, In Effect, That Is Not Hierarchical.

It Was A Source Of Both Terror And Comfort To Me Then That I Often Seemed Invisible - Incompletely And Minimally Existent, In Fact. It Seemed To Me That I Made No Impact On The World, And That In Exchange I Was Privileged To Watch It Unawares.