The statements quoted below have variously heartened and chastened me over the years. Some have served as epigraphs for books of mine; all have functioned as provocations. I apologize for my inability to source them all precisely; a number of them come from notebooks of mine kept in a period when I had forsworn scholarly concerns, while I found others in sources that themselves lacked footnotes. Any more exact citation of source or correction of inaccuracy will be appreciated.

-- A. D. C.

The humor in Maine stories, like all insular humor, is understated, packed down by the tremendous compression exerted on people by the sea. In the mountains and on the plains, the tendency is for broad-gauged humor and tall tales; the land acts as a vacuum, and stories pour out of people to fill up the empty spaces. Which is why, when the Texas rancher tells the Maine farmer it takes five days to drive around his ranch, the Maine man says, "I got a car like that myself." These are the two great schools of ancient Greek humor -- the unbounded romantic and the tight, carefully formed classical. And the Greeks molded comedy on the human form: the comic hero falls and then rises, like a breath out and a breath in, like the contour of a smile. We have put all the old stories -- the music of them and the meaning -- too much out of our lives. We forget that instant gratification, a laugh every ten seconds, only breaks up a story. And once we have lost the thread of our own stories, then they spill out, under duress, on the couch. A story is what holds us together, and what is left when we leave. We've been broken up long enough.

. . . I'm used to writing for very different kinds of publications and I'm very aware that if I write for the Washington Post I'm going to write a certain way and if I write for Social Text: Journal of Marxism and Culture, I'm going to write another way and if I write for an art magazine, I have to write another way and I have to use certain kinds of language and I have to use a certain kind of approach, because if I don't, I will not find a place for the things I need to say in that space. It's very normal in a lot of Latin American countries -- probably because of constant economic crisis -- for people who teach in colleges and universities to also be journalists, and to also be cab drivers, frankly, and to be used to moving from one space to another. And this country is much more rigid about that. Academics live in university towns and talk to students and their colleagues and use a very specialized language, for the most part. That tends to distance them from the possibility of being public intellectuals. We don't have very many. . . . I'm saying maybe there are things that can be learned from other contexts, where people do have to move around and be ready to talk in a non-specialized language about complex ideas.

Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. . . .

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. . . .

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. . . . It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

Another instance of a flight from feeling surfaces in the tone of much professional criticism of films, plays, books, or music. Too often it seems to be a habit among such writers to appear to be above what they are considering -- as if letting themselves become involved in the work from within would somehow deprive them of the objectivity needed to criticize. They resist letting themselves become touched emotionally. Such a fear of feeling does a basic injustice to the work being considered because it prevents it from being experienced. The result is that the critic focuses on technique and tangential matters that are more manageable. Such critics suffer from spiritual anemia; they do not possess what every genuine critic must have -- largeness of soul.

I value very much these ideas that can't be explained and that enter the individual, and I don't think that collectively we have made friends with our heads yet. I think we really need to. I think every writer needs something to keep him going. I mean, in my case, it's certainly not making me rich or getting me multimillion-dollar film deals. I keep going because I really feel that all the ideas and words and special effects that are in the air want us to be the organs of perception that perceive them. It wants to be done. It's my religion. I'm a religious writer.