Balzac

How horrible it would be to look out on everything and see everything exactly as it is!

But there are some things you just can't lie about; and if you do lie you'll be punished by not being able to be yourself for 2 years and 7 months.

Ian C., an Irishman now living in San Francisco likes to talk. He's full of stories and jokes, one and two-liners, stories and jokes pour out of him in some sort of perverse homage to the literature of Ireland. But when Ian speaks you don't think about what he's saying, you only think, "what's the point?"

In the New York Review of Books (Feb. 20, 2014) Geoffrey O'Brien suggests the best way to read Balzac is as "a battlefield of language--in the same way the human world provides a spectacle convulsive with opposing desires and contending wills."

Balzac's stories, O'Brien continues, "which often show us humanity in extreme situations, are also about the power of storytelling--and about the effect of that power in the listener."

In an actual work of fiction the reader never understands everything he reads, and the writer even less so.