Jesse Ball (1978-) Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently, the novel How To Set a Fire and Why. His prizewinning works of absurdity have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. The recipient of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize, as well as fellowships from the NEA, the Heinz foundation, and others, he is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it.
We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise.
You aren’t the thing that needs to change. It’s that you are overcome by your situation, by the way the world has descended on you. There is much in you that is young and new – and not just in you. In any person, even the oldest conceivable person. That’s what it means to be living – to engage with the cacophony of objects.
The world isn’t the place we are told to live in. It is another place entirely. We have both more choice, and less, than we are supposed to have.
– Some people forget, do you know – they forget what it is like to be young, to feel things ruthlessly, terribly. If you forget that much of life, well, I don’t know.
As I sat in the office of the cure, he began to speak and explain to me what it was. I was there, and I had no choice but to continue, it seemed there was nothing but that, nothing else – and yet, it was being explained to me, almost without my permission, as a matter of course, this thing I did not understand: the cure for suicide.
No one explains this to you, he thought. That there are so many things without solution.
If you want to say, Lucia, there is no inside of the park benches, I won’t argue with you. But, then you have to say where the pigeons come from.
