\n"}I\u2019m still obsessed with \u201cthe art of conversation,\u201d to the point that it is now clear to me that I will never be truly satisfied.
\nI like to think of it as having been one of my multiple favorite interests in college, along with Greek religion and classical philology. \u00a0I spent a great deal of time reading Dante and Inferno, from a very young age. \u00a0I read a great deal of Ulysses, and specifically the first 300 or so pages or so, every single day of my senior year. \u00a0And much of that is because I was obsessed with the notion of dialogue, of literary and artistic creation, of the possibility that a person could write and have artistic control over their art. \u00a0The idea that you could have made a world which was entirely of your choosing, which was one and only one person\u2019s interpretation. \u00a0That you could have controlled the means by which you saw, the means by which you heard, the means by which you told stories, the means by which you heard your stories, as in\u00a0a greater world, as in a Platonic realm, whose ranks you were ever awakening, the voice in which your feet beleaguer upon the plain, as in a neolithic, metered world, (\u201cman, those mountains sound like frogs\u201d \u2013 this sentence in that morning\u2019s dream, in that dream, not Milton\u2019s infinite infinitesimal), and now I\u2019m not sure where I\u2019m going with this, but I guess I just think I\u2019ve always had a special affinity for this (in the derogatory sense, though \u2013 the two are not mutually exclusive):
\nI like the sense that you could grow to that world, that you could become what you read, imagine that world fully, that you could be something out of the ordinary in your mode of encounter, but at the cost of becoming a bizarre, unpredictable being that no one could imagine, that all of your reactions would be unpredictable.
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