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Great post.

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Yes, you nailed it Scott. To be brutally honest with the mimetic jargon of the times. But how few want to be helped by this internal resolution that writers do; writing is to contribute to society, and then to culture, if good enough. Yes, so I have a character, a protagonist, who is not a writer but who is a writer of his soul, a professional specialist in CS (computer science), for example, contracted in the Middle East. Educated, fastidious, endowed with conscience and a passion for reading history. He takes this with him to an Arab land, and sees all the roguishness of provisional interregnums of man made explicit there, by the expatriates especially – and he thinks, along your lines. And he comes to the conclusion: why should I help those who don’t want to be helped, or can’t, and so strongly can’t, cynically don’t want – accusing you of intruding onto a ground that they think they hold and don’t understand is another provisional interregnum between the past where we were able to learn and the present where, it appears strongly, we can’t. A constant of history, so he asks, well in that case then I should go ahead. Or if he feels much about it and figures that it’s not a constant, but a new matter that is driving the destruction of language which is understanding at a regimented speed the likes of which we have never seen before, as he wonders and wanders through the reading he has done and which stays in his head to evaluate. He concludes, ‘the explicit downfall of empathy and understanding.’ So he wonders, why should I? And he says, probably not. This is not a thesis. I wonder too. I wrote this just for this comment to you and your new posts and past posts that show their usual fluid and comforting analysis that flows in your writing like a salve. But for me, it’s that good. And it makes me wonder whether from the view of conscience writing for the enjoyment and cultivation of other human beings really makes sense any more. I’m Not Sure It Does.

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