“The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable – who we are, why we are – and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.”
