Inside the Even Bigger Whale

I.

So it all began when I reread George Orwell’s 1940 essay “Inside the Whale” for the first time in years and it sent me into a not entirely mild state of crisis. Discussions about literature came to seem pointless; phrases like “conglomeration” and “MFA program” and “The New Yorker” tasted bitter on the tongue. Scrolling my Substack timeline produced an acute feeling of surfeit and nausea. My internal monologue began sounding like Ecclesiastes. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.

I felt that way because it turns out that every tiresome argument on the timeline was anticipated in “Inside the Whale,” 86 years ago. One often hears, in assessments of the state of contemporary literature, that writers go straight from top high school to elite college to MFA program, and are spat out with only their institutional experience to write about, whereas writers back in the day used to go to sea, go to war, play piano in a Parisian brothel, and otherwise accumulate the life experience necessary to produce a wide and varied and thriving art form, and not just a series of navel-gazing novels about writers attending fellowships and having affairs in Brooklyn. Here, then, is Orwell:

‘Cultured’ middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a public-school education — five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery — can actually be looked back upon as an eventful period. To nearly all the writers who have counted during the thirties, what more has ever happened than Mr Connolly records in Enemies of Promise? It is the same pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour — hardly even words.

One often hears that publishing has been ideologically captured by a cabal of woke zealots, who spurn art that is genuinely uncomfortable or interrogative in favor of didactic moralism performed by people with the right identity characteristics, who have brought a thriving art form to its knees with their well-intentioned meddling and prim, censorious attitudes. Here, then, with slight variations, is Orwell:

No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be touched by the zeitgeist was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a sort of voluntary censorship (‘Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?’) was at work in nearly everyone’s mind. It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. ‘Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

And one constantly hears—oh God, how one hears!—of the tension between art and politics, of whether it is the artist’s job to critique society or simply describe it, of whether all art is political or none is. “Inside the Whale,” which begins as a review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and expands outward to take in the entire literary history of the past two decades, takes up that question and answers it very ably. Tropic of Cancer, says Orwell, which narrates the Miller-protagonist’s life among the deadbeats and down-and-outs of Paris in scabrous and sexually explicit prose, has a “mental atmosphere” that seems to “belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.” The poets and novelists that emerged in the 1920s, he says, had a range of often-incompatible political views but shared a sense of pessimism and disenchantment, which you can see equally in Eliot’s mournful “twilight-of-the-gods feeling,” Pound’s snarling Fascism, Hemingway’s wounded drifters, and Joyce’s chastened liberalism, that of “a Catholic who has lost his faith.”

This made for an age where, while writers may have subscribed to a wide range of ideologies, politics and aesthetics were not inextricably linked. Indeed, for many of these writers, their politics seem to have been a largely aesthetic stance. Lawrence’s longing for the sex-and-death world of the Aztecs and Yeats’s Celtic esotericism are not exactly workable political programs. In larger cultural circles, ars gratia artis held sway, “Literature was supposed to consist solely in the manipulation of words,” says Orwell, “To judge a book by its subject matter was the unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked on as a lapse of a taste.”

As Stalin and Hitler ascended and the world seemed to be hurtling towards a final apocalyptic conflagration, orthodoxies began to harden. Writers who had shared bylines in the same little magazines were now forced to choose a side; they found themselves drafted into—does this sound familiar?—reactionary Catholicism on one side, and earnest Marxism on the other, the latter exemplified by the poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNiece, and Cecil Day-Lewis. This commitment to bringing about world revolution or universal salvation produced a smug certainty, a blithe attitude towards the lives of others. Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and barely escaped being murdered by Stalin’s agents, reprimands Auden for a line in his poem “Spain” about “necessary murder.” What could this bright-eyed Oxford boy, safe in his perch in the London literary world, know about the meaning of murder?

But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men – I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means – the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’ or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

Finally, having surveyed much of the landscape of English letters between 1918 and 1940, Orwell returns to Miller. Miller’s perspective is valuable, he says, precisely because it lacks this millenarian certainty. He is “inside the whale,” he “has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.” His perspective is a true account of how many people feel: buffeted about by great upheavals, foam on the tides of history. Nearly all the worthwhile literature from the Great War, he notes, was written not by “cocksure partisans telling you what to think,” but by “common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about.” It is all well and good to strive to make a political point in your writing, as Orwell had done in Homage to Catalonia and would go on to do in Animal Farm and 1984 and many more essays. But simply capturing the feeling of the times can be equally valuable, and in many cases more likely to endure. If Orwell had been a soldier in the trenches of the Great War, he writes, he wouldn’t have wanted to read some jingoistic pamphlet or cry against the pointlessness of war. He would have wanted to read Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” because it was, in the midst of the “bombs and the food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice.” And that’s what it’s all about… right?

II.

A few days after I reread “Inside the Whale,” the writer Grace Byron published an attack on two of her contemporaries. “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-girl” sets its sights on Madeline Cash’s novel Lost Lambs, and Anika Jade Levy’s novel Flat Earth, accusing these writers, who operate in an internet-addled post-Didion post-Ellis post-everything key, of making literature safe for the MAGA crowd.

These women pretend to satirize the conservative world they inhabit when in reality their belief system is a dog whistle for conservative far-right values. They use internet aesthetics (emojis, Epstein satire, Dimes Square Catholicism) as linguistic currency to obscure the emptiness of their beliefs. In interviews they say they’re writing about flat, archetypical women as a way to skewer male perceptions. But merely depicting misogyny, sex work, conservatism, the shallowness of internet culture, and eating disorders is not inherently radical or progressive. Their novels are about “flat” women who only want men and sex and to be skinny.

And so on, and so forth. If you follow contemporary culture you will, perhaps against your will, recognize the opposing forces here. Here are two groups of downwardly mobile bohemians adrift in the ever-more-unaffordable metropole, one choosing to judge art via a rigid political framework that suffocates the irony and tension that powers the novel, the other making that irony so pervasive and their ennui so corrosive that saying anything true becomes nearly impossible. Normally with this sort of thing I would peruse the responses and counter-responses, write it off as a mildly entertaining contretemps of no real significance, and call it a day.

But putting aside Cash (I have not read the much-discussed Lost Lambs, though I enjoyed her initial collection Earth Angel), I noticed something about the dichotomy of Byron and Levy specifically: it was “Inside the Whale”! It was exactly that of Auden and Miller in “Inside the Whale”! Levy is Miller: flat and passive and deadpan. Flat Earth is an immersion in a Downtown nightmare world of art openings and trendy bars, where friendship is cheap, sexual encounters are transactional, and money flows in from suspicious places. Byron is Auden: earnest, passionate, doctrinaire. She too had written a novel: Herculine, a pulpy horror story set on a trans commune in Indiana. As for myself, I had been thinking about trying harder to survey the scene of contemporary literature, and not just write about the art form as if it was something that had a good run, but ended around 1998 or so. This was perfect. I would read these two books and learn something and the contours of the direction and future of the novel would become slightly clearer. I would revitalize the discourse. I would develop a new synthesis of the aesthetic and the political. I would be the George Orwell of Pasadena, California. I would write “Inside the Whale 2”!

Look, I’m not naive, I didn’t expect or need Flat Earth and Herculine to be Tropic of Cancer or “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” or “September 1, 1939.” I thought they would each have some good aspects, some bad aspects, and some interesting sociological takeaways, and I really did go in with an open mind, ready to enjoy myself, with no bias towards either camp. But I didn’t expect the experience to frustrate me this much.

The idea that I could use these books to illustrate some major ideological rupture and its tendencies fell apart almost instantly. These books do not illustrate two opposing worldviews on how society should be organized and what should be valued, as the work of Auden and, say, D.H. Lawrence quite genuinely did. In fact, Levy’s politics, both inside and outside the text, seem to be fairly standard liberal ones. Flat Earth reads to me as a bleak and acidic but nevertheless feminist-ish critique of how women in the art scene are seen only in terms of their sexual value. In a recent interview, she discusses her discomfort with the darker aspects of the “intense infusion of tech and crypto money downtown,” and refers to Trump as an “evil tyrant.”

Instead, these two books illustrate two nearly infinitesimally different sets of consumer preferences. Ridgewood vs. Dimes Square. Ketamine vs. Cocaine. A24 horror films vs. A24 dramas. Zohran vs. who-gives-a-shit. Here is a passage from Flat Earth describing a man the narrator dates:

In his Artforum interview, the only influences he cited were authors: David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, and unsurprisingly, Roberto Bolaño. I had never actually read Bolaño but I did have a reference to The Savage Detectives (1998) tattooed on my right wrist because I thought the drawing was beautiful and because experience had taught me that this book was popular with the type of literary male who will enthusiastically slap you around during sex.

Here is a passage from Herculine describing the same:

He was the kind of Brooklyn white guy to react if you critiqued the micro-identity he’d carefully formed through years of scrolling. He downplayed his Supreme addiction in favor of Male Feminist discourse, David Lynch’s coffee line, and Roberto Bolaño’s “complicated engagement with femicide and surrealism.” He asked me to go to Film Forum a few times a month and as much as I enjoyed a seven-hour movie, I usually tried to find an excuse not to.

(Can’t a guy enjoy a little Bolaño these days? Christ!)

Both of these books feature dissatisfying, dissociative hookups. Both of these books feature professional jealousy: Herculine’s nameless narrator seethes at the “Hot Freelance Girls” who write for Vogue and the Times and Flat Earth’s Avery watches her best friend Frances achieve success and acclaim as a filmmaker. Both of these books feature thinly disguised locales and side characters that those in or adjacent to their world will recognize (hey, it’s the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research!). Both even feature a long chapter set at a gallery opening, so the narrator can make witty remarks about various denizens of bohemia. Only the first third of Herculine is a New York Art World novel; the narrator soon flees her dissatisfying life for her ex’s commune, which turns out to have cut a Faustian bargain with various evil supernatural entities, and stock horror scenes (bug hallucinations, demonic pregnancies, summoning rituals) ensue. But this is merely to trade one set of cliches for another, the demons are named “Asmodeus” and “Dagon,” and the way in which the horror elements are deployed, in their pacing, their content, and their lack of interiority, is lifted straight from a thousand films.

Flat Earth at least wants to be a novel, and is not settling for being one. It has some arresting images and sequences, and some lovely bits of writing, particularly in the first section, a road trip narrative through the middle of the country. But it is ultimately not much more than a series of scenes. Avery is the same jaded, indolent, self-loathing character on the first page and the last. Perhaps that doesn’t matter in a book this short—224 pages, lots of blank space—but it leads to a thin, depressing feeling, particularly when the various sketches of Downtown life are padded out with impressionistic stream-of-consciousness sections (some of which, to be fair, I did rather like). Herculine does have a genuinely suspenseful plot and a sort of rough and passionate energy, but the prose is astonishingly, if you’ll pardon the pun, graceless. A pulp horror novel doesn’t have to be Proust, but both Herculine and “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-girl” contain sentences that (as Ella Dorn has elsewhere pointed out) simply do not meet the basic requirements of English prose.

I walked through wind tunnels formed by huge towers hunting for high-end moisturizers.

The autumn wind blowing in with a few final pranks. But the aura of the camp felt hostile. The landscape of my nightmares easily mapped onto the eerie woods. Birches boxed us in like a ruptured womb. I felt a Freudian attachment to the sacrificial pig. How long would it before [sic] that was me on the spit?

Renata Adler was able to tap deep wells of political weather and crystalline, biting prose.

I’m not trying to cry woke scold, not entirely, I’m pointing out that this satirical bend is a foggy fictional tool that these women can hide behind.

Anyone can cherry-pick some grammatical infelicities, so you’ll have to take me at my word that when I say there are quite a lot of these. In my last essay I got some pushback for saying it was incumbent upon writers to read the classics in their tradition; well here is a book that would have been much improved if its author had spent six months reading Middlemarch and Ulysses and The Portrait of a Lady and all the other Novels 101 books to learn how elegant variation and vivid metaphor and descriptive precision work. It should be said that Byron is not some random Substacker publishing on a tiny small press, who it would be churlish to attack. This is a Simon & Schuster book by a writer with bylines in America’s most prestigious publications. Someone I know whose book is coming out on a major imprint recently told me her book is not being edited at all; not for structure, not on the line level, no proofreading, nothing. I suppose that’s where we’re at.

All of this can’t help but instill in me the feeling that these are not books but book-shaped discourse objects, meant to appear on a shelf to display your allegiance to one or another subcultural tribe, and that I’ve been played for a sucker by thinking they might have something to tell me. It makes me feel like the one inhabitant of a Potemkin village, trying to find the post office and wondering why the grocery store is never open. I was nearly done with Herculine when I read this note from Isabel Pabán Freed that, as the kids say, oneshotted me.

i kinda feel like at this point, we’ve done enough Contemporary Literature Discourse that we could do the situation so described by zizek here with new novels and the essays criticizing them: one machine writes three to four novels about trying to navigate feeling complicit with an apocalyptic capitalism, all of which produce a reading experience uncannily similar to scrolling on your phone; the other machine groups said novels under a shared name that is somewhat dismissive of their theme, and then at the end, gestures at how novels could be good, again. meanwhile, novelist and critic have retired to the breakfast nook, where we can sip our coffees and discuss the changing weather and sexual mores

She’s right. Who cares? I could go into more detail on these books and their flaws, but it feels pointless. There is just so little at stake. Many writers I otherwise respect praised the stunningly incoherent “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-Girl,” which seemed to prove that much criticism of this type is not actually read, but simply rapidly scanned for good lines to use against one’s purported aesthetic or ideological foes. I’m not interested in providing that type of ammunition for anyone. I could be really vicious and cutting about these books and probably churn up a lot of discourse and get a lot of shares and likes (I did, of course, buy and read Byron’s book because of her hostile essay, the system works!), but it wouldn’t feel like I was doing anything noble or worthwhile. Byron and Levy may have good bylines and a book deal, but those don’t buy you a summer cottage in Amagansett like they used to. I have no doubt they feel just as precarious and disposable as I do. The ship has sunk and we’re all clinging to the wreckage. I genuinely wish both of them the best.

Contrast that with “Inside the Whale,” where the stakes feel very high. Orwell predicts that civilization is entering “an age of totalitarian dictatorships — an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction” and that “The literature of liberalism is coming to an end.” And yet he still thinks it is worthwhile to spend much of his time discussing it. This is a man who went to Spain and got a bullet in the throat for his troubles. When he upbraids Auden for not knowing the meaning of murder, it means something, it is not just a minor quarrel among different species of Brooklynite. He criticizes Auden in strong terms because he believes literature is a very powerful thing.

I have the Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell’s essays, a big red 1400-page brick. There is much in there about Hitler and Stalin and Churchill and Spain, there are the famous essays on the common toad and the ideal English pub and how to make a cup of tea, there are thoughts on the condition of the poor, there are the brilliant portraits of colonial life “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.” But the vast majority, perhaps seventy percent, are about books. Orwell was not some scholar who retreated into the written word because he couldn’t face life in all its complexity. He traveled the world, he worked in the lowest of conditions, he threw himself into political causes, he was ready to die for his beliefs, and still he came to the conclusion that writing was the supreme human activity, the one most worth thinking about. This attitude was once common. I now question if it exists even among the shrinking pool of people who do it for a living.

III.

Yet as a great poet once said, hope is a dangerous thing for a writer like me to have—but I have it. I can’t stop myself from rolling the boulder uphill. I’m going to follow the script and “gesture at how novels could be good, again.” More accurately, I’m going to point out that novels are still good—really!—it is just that our means and method of discussing them are very badly broken.

I’m a little over halfway through The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker-winning novel about a young gay aesthete who finds himself living with a family of Conservative power brokers in Thatcher’s England. It turns out that as recently as 2004 you could skip all the postmodern Infinite Jest-George Saunders-Cloud Atlas self-consciousness and insecurity and write a novel that feels like it slots right in there with the greats, a novel of exquisite sensitivity and grace, without any showstopping passages but with an accumulation of finely chosen details that renders a world and a time with startling, vivid accuracy and care, a novel of long languid dusks and champagne flutes on manor lawns, of the heady rush of first love and the scent and fumbling of sex and the spiraling crashing feeling of heartbreak and pain. It’s the kind of novel that you put down at the end of a page or a chapter just to think: fucking hell, this is what it’s all about. 2004 was a long time ago now, but Hollinghurst is still active and only 70 years old, not nearly in his nineties like Pynchon or DeLillo or Norman Rush. He released a new novel, Our Evenings, a little over a year ago. If it’s half as good as The Line of Beauty, I’m not ready to give up on the form.

I’ve written here and there about the work of Bruce Wagner, though never at length (a comprehensive Metropolitan Review piece by John Pistelli has already done the honors). Wagner, born in 1954, has spent the last decade in a furious late-career burst of creativity comparable to the Philip Roth of Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral. His recent novels, The Marvel Universe, ROAR, and Amputation are fearless and psychedelically vivid; he takes subjects that should be a young person’s game (the fluidity of gender, the churn and pull and jabber of social media, the feeling of hyperreality that pervades everyday life), and depicts them better than most young writers, marrying them to the big, majestic, Tolstoyan questions of life and death. With his low, rumbling voice and buddhistic calm, Wagner is a fixture on the alternative media circuit, having appeared on Red Scare, WTF With Marc Maron, and The Rich Roll Podcast, one of those fitness/pop-science/self-help podcasts for manly men, which I had never heard of but which has nearly two million subscribers. Any major publishing house (Wagner publishes on the distinguished but tiny Arcade) would kill to publish something that resonates with jaded e-girls and new age gym bros alike, so it is quite depressing that the mainstream literary press has overlooked these astonishing books, all of which would have been an Underworld-level literary event twenty years ago. But hard work and passion and true belief on their advocates’ part has nevertheless found them an audience, a fit audience, which is all that one can really hope for at the end of the day.

What of writers of my own generation, the writers I have so thoroughly registered my disenchantment with above? Well, it turns out that even books that seem to come straight from the assembly line, zany Zillennial novels about a young woman trying to find love in (shudder) Brooklyn that get the standard hosannas and critiques from the standard magazines, can still surprise you. Towards the end of writing this essay, I started leafing through Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic, which catches a stray in “Look Mom I’m a Hegelian E-Girl,” just to cover all my bases. To my surprise, I spent the next two days reading through it with delight. Paradise Logic, which follows a moony young woman named Reality Kahn on a surreal quest to become “the greatest girlfriend of all time,” is very good. It is playful and inventive and strange and funny. You can tell Kemp cares deeply about language and style, about writing a book for the book’s sake, not creating some sort of Clout Object to better position herself as a public intellectual and online personality. There is a lot of Joyce in this book, a lot of Gertrude Stein. I happened upon her Goodreads profile after reading Paradise Logic (she’s the top review of it) and was smugly satisfied to find that she reads not just Speedboat and The Princess of 72nd Street but Stendhal and Colette and Henry James. She studies the blade! She cares! And you can tell, reading Paradise Logic. No novel could be more dissimilar to Henry James, yet it nevertheless has that extra special something, the cube of butter in the sauce, the flaky sea salt on the steak. It is a slim (what’s with all the white space these days?) and mostly silly book, but it is a novel, a literary work of art, a real one, for an age that is sorely lacking in them.

Yet you wouldn’t know that from reading the reviews, positive though most of them are, because they approach the book through such an instantly-deadening discourse lens. Paradise Logic, to go by the coverage it has received, is about an “E-girl” (the internet hardly features in the book). It “confronts toxic masculinity and the contradictions of female desire.” It is about a world of “heteropessimism” where “gender roles are a prison.” Most of this is not inaccurate per se, but all of it misses the sheer exuberance of the book, the way it delights in itself, the way it is in conversation with its predecessors. Had I not been doing my due diligence for this essay, I almost certainly would have skipped Paradise Logic. In their praise, they manage to make it sound bad, to make it sound just like everything else.

One always hears that it takes time for the shape of an era to become clear, for the work that will last to emerge. Yet, reading “Inside the Whale,” one is surprised at how by 1940 it was in fact quite clear who would still be read in nearly a century. The modernists were all canonized by this point; there is no question, to Orwell, of the centrality of Joyce, Eliot, and Yeats. Miller has slipped in acclaim, but you can still find Tropic of Cancer at any reputable large bookstore. Auden turned out to be one of the major English poets of the century. Of course some reputations have inevitably fallen and others have risen, but on the whole, Orwell’s picture of his time was quite accurate. Not so for us. Hype and fads and puffery are nothing new, of course—as Orwell laid out for us in the beginning of this essay, hardly anything is new—but our current literary ecosystem has a distinct Late Soviet feeling. It is hard to tell who or what is real, difficult to sort worthwhile art from the objects masquerading as such. The factories are staffed by skeleton crews, they let books pass through the assembly line unedited and un-fussed over. The border guards and customs officials in the press give them a cursory glance, sort them into some identifiable category (zany e-girl, upper-middle-class identity narrative, angry young man, heartwarming family saga), and dutifully rubber stamp them, or else consign them to oblivion. The likes of you and I wander through windswept streets under grey skies, past empty tower blocks and the looted and graffitied remains of the People’s Assembly Palace and the Great Patriotic War Memorial. Does any of this matter any more? Does anyone care?

Obviously at least some people do, or I wouldn’t have an audience and you wouldn’t be here, at the end of these 5500 words on the subject. I have ended too many essays with a roll call of all my friends from the computer, and so I will refrain from doing that here, but the last few years have been a slow realization for me that people, given the proper platforms and opportunities, do still care about the written word, and that good work will still find its way to those who look for it. New publications spring up all the time and old ones are revitalized; new passions and new perspectives abound. The novel and the poem and the essay are tough old beasts, and they will endure, even in these inauspicious circumstances.

“Literary criticism is not essential to literature,” Martin Amis once said, “but both are essential to civilization.” The forms that both of these things take in our time won’t look like it did in 1940 or 1970 or 1990; a painful lesson I am still trying to internalize. And the great ideological clash of our time won’t be between civilization and fascism, as it was for Orwell, but between human and anti-human, between the people who believe art can be produced and criticized and consumed entirely by machines and the people who believe all of those things rely on the expression of an individual consciousness.

So we had better get to it. We have inherited a crumbling house, and much of our time will have to be spent restoring the basic functions: cleaning out the chimney, putting in the windows. We most likely won’t make a living off of it, or enjoy widespread acclaim and celebrity. But with the proper work ethic and attention and passion, it’s still possible to rebuild that house in our own image, slowly and carefully, brick by lonesome brick.