Quote of the Day (David Mason, on Fiction and ‘Small Passages of Civility in Our Lives’)

“Fiction allows us to mourn with strangers. Even horrifying stories create, by virtue of their shape and their empathy, small passages of civility in our lives. Civilization is something we must choose; humanity is something we must make. Novels are particularly well-equipped to show us how social problems affect individual lives, but artists rarely envision viable solutions to the problems they dramatize. Perhaps it is easier to forgive in the imagination than in the streets and pubs and houses.”—American poet, librettist ,essayist, and memoirist David Mason, “Forgiving the Past,” The Sewanee Review, Spring 1998 (“Irish Literature Today”)

Mason’s essay appeared in the relatively early days of American polarization, as ideologically driven cable news stations and Internet sites were just starting to exacerbate real but still not unbridgeable differences in the nation. Since then, more and more people are addicted to their mobile phones and anti-social media.

Genres that require time, patience, and understanding—very much including the novel—have been increasingly falling by the wayside in the last quarter-century—and those “small passages of civility in our lives” that Mason hailed are growing increasingly narrow.

(The accompanying outdoor photo of David Mason, taken Apr. 24, 2012, was sent by the poet to Christine Mason.)