or seductive. But art is also transgressive and the transgressive function of art is fundamental

in a society that often shies away from the difficult topics, the difficult subjects and

the difficult conversations it needs to engage in. We all live in societies that repress

and silence what’s troubling, what’s naughty, what’s sort of in some ways I think threatening.

But art has this way of provoking. Art has this way of imposing these silences, breaking

these silences and posing these conversations on us. And I think it’s absolutely important

that we as a society think in ways that we often don’t imagine subjects that we often

sort of shy away from and enter silences that we’re not often encouraged to do so. Because

in these silences in what’s disavowed awaits who we really are as a culture and a society.

And I think art has been great for this. But as people, you know, members of a civic society

we also have to push ourselves into the places that are not entirely comfortable. In silence

is where tyranny and oppression really does its work and therefore the conversations that

are often relegated to the margins, the conversations that are considered impolite, those are the

conversations that are much more likely to lead to a more fair and just society. It’s

not readily apparent to folks but literature is one of our great artistic mediums. It’s

one of our great innovations which allows a reader to not only transport themselves

temporally but also spatially that permits them to enter not just other people but other

worlds. It’s the closest that we come to telepathy, to be able to inhabit other people’s

minds. It’s a wonderful exercise in compassion and sympathies and when one thinks about it

sort of, you know over the long term a relationship with literature produces extraordinary effects

in that it brings the reader not only in contact with other times and other places but it brings

the reader in contact with themselves. Literature opens inside of a reader a space of deliberation

which allows them to not only reconstruct their own subjectivity but also to dialogue

with themselves and with other conceptualizations of other selves. It’s an extraordinary art

and I think that it’s one of the best ways that people can educate the soul. And simply

because it’s not as popular as say as like Twitter doesn’t make it any less significant

or any less important.