Memory Is The Sense Of Loss, And

Two Questions I Can't Really Answer About Fiction Are 1) Where It Comes From, And 2) Why We Need It. But That We Do Create It And Also Crave It Is Beyond Dispute.

More Generally, People Who Lived In A Period When Maternal, Infant And Childhood Mortality Were Still High Would Have Been Tougher Than Most Of Us Can Imagine.

I Can’t Believe We Will Forget Our Sorrows Altogether. That Would Mean Forgetting That We Had Lived, Humanly Speaking. Sorrow Seems To Me To Be A Great Part Of The Substance Of Human Life.

Religion, If It Is Genuine, Is So Profoundly Interwoven With Individual Thought And Experience That It Is No More Exhaustible Than Consciousness Itself. And Fiction Whose Purpose Is Didactic Is Bad No Matter Whether The Matter To Be "taught" Is Christianity Or The World View Of Ayn Rand. It Seems Often To Be Assumed By Writers That Religion Is A Pose, Meant To Deceive Oneself Or Others, Or That It Is A Bad Patch On Doubt Or Complexity. This Is Only Convention, However. The Writers I Know Have A Much Deeper Engagement With The Real Issues Of Religion.

Protestantism, Of Course, Is Much More Explicitly Divided Into Different Traditions - The Pentecostals, The Anglicans. But There Is The Main Tradition Of Protestantism That Comes Out Of The Reformation And That Produced People Like Kant And Hegel And So On, Who Are Not Normally Thought Of As Being People Writing In A Theological Tradition, Although Hegel, Of Course, Wrote Theology His Whole Life.