The best reason for writing novels

“I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I’d been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then I lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there a long time, crying. It was sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky.”

— Zadie Smith, from her essay collection Changing My Mind

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Things I’ve been thinking about lately:

• One’s heightened powers of observation of the natural and social worlds, which come when you know that you might have to write something and then share it with someone.
• Relearning Japanese and how it is killing my brain. I feel only slightly justified to learn that the Foreign Service Institute ranked Japanese as the hardest language for an English-speaker to learn. Should that make me feel proud, or super-super depressed? I’m really leaning toward the latter.
• Getting a (canine) sibling for Pyrrha. But only kind of thinking about this, because two dogs is a lot of dogs. And I think Pyrrha is pretty perfect, and what if we ended up with a four-legged terror?
• Fall! Beautiful, glorious fall!

Happy weekend, everyone.