Italo Calvo was right, of course. Sterne is not simply a member of the Scriblerian approach of Learned Wit, but the “undoubted progenitor”and archetype of the avant-garde novel. By reputation, the avant-garde is seen as radical experimentation, or by its fiercest critics, a form of posturing self-indulgence. But at its root, there may be something more modest, a distillation of the very nature of humility, “to let people tell their stories their own way.”

You can try. As you set out on your journey, you can try and reach your destination. But you won’t make it. That vision of what you thought you had, glimpsed in some moment of abandonment, the unstructured play the garden of our childish inspiration. The dream of what you are to become. But you won’t get too far. A step or two before the forces will bear down upon you, turn you the way to inevitability. No person makes their destiny. No one is master, architect, God of their fate. Life is not evil. Consciousness is not our burden. The madness is the dream. But we can’t abandon the dream. We are desiring machines and So instead we tell stories. Find the other through their imagined possibilities. Then collapse, take in their sustenance and inspiration returns, I am going nowhere. And yet I am everything. Hope, she says. And Hope she is. This is the real source, the true fountain of our faith. 10,000 words cannot convince you. It has to be experienced to be believed.

The hypothesis (both political and biological) that life begins at conception quickly leads us to a Shandean absurdity. But where to begin? Few of us can act with unerring constancy, blessed with a supernatural ability to wind our sexual clocks in the same precise manner, down to the precise hour, minute and day of the week in order to be able to pinprick the exact moment of our holy ejaculation. Worse, we are left with the disfigured homunculi, prior to twinning, prior to salvation, a sin-ridden, rotting lowly foundling, not a divine creature of light nobly fashioned from God’s precious clay. The Supreme Court (were they collectively capable of divining the tangled roots of their own misguided pronouncements) should immediately seek to rectify this terrible state of affairs by discerning within constitutional law an inalienable right of the state to perform intrauterine baptisms against a woman’s right to choose the manner of her child’s fate/faith.

For your eyes only: these words written on the page are in strict confidence.

This is both the alluring promise and the innate shortcoming of the novel.

Seriousness is that “mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.” – Tristram Shandy

A: We must choose our battles wisely.

B: By that, you mean, we must choose no battles.

C: But why must we fight?

D: War is our holy and sacred duty.

E: It’s a terrible secret I keep buried deep inside my heart. I do not care enough about any of you to want to fight you. Better to let you slip away into the darkness.

“Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.”

Death is a fiction, the worst fiction, a terrible excuse for not living. There is no death. There is only living. So get on with the living.