saturday morning jam

you are mine

&

-for human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. we cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. but in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. in this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence, and, even if the novelist has not got it correctly, well--he has tried. he can post his people in as babies, he cause them to go on without sleep or food, he can make them be in love, love and nothing but love, provided he seems to know everything about them, provided they are his creations. that is why moll flanders cannot be here, that is one of the reasons why amelia and emma cannot be here. they are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible; we are people whose secret lives are invisible. and

that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us: they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

(e.m. forster on homo sapiens vs homo fictus)