We need a contemporary Cervantes

Like many returning veterans throughout history, Cervantes found his country unable and unwilling to help him return to society. He was a wounded war hero and was held captive for 5 years, during which time Cervantes experienced both the depravity and the humanity of an enemy culture. Ransomed at last, he regained a homeland that seemed to have forgotten his sacrifices and that was intent on covering the patent failures of its domestic and foreign policy with a patchwork of religious fanaticism and ethnic scapegoating. 

In a time and a culture ( early 17^th c Spain) when xenophobia was the national religion, when the poor were assumed to have deserved their lot, and when women were thought to be naturally subservient to men, Cervantes regularly wrote with compassion and humor to explore the feelings and experiences of religious and ethnic minorities, social outcasts, old people and women.

Who will be our Cervantes? We need one.

Conflict isn't Everything

Inspiration looks like madness from the outside and feels like madness from the inside.

When I found him, he was writing an avant-garde novel which I think was about the feeling of insects on your skin as a symbol for death. The feeling or the skin was the main character I think.

      Then he wrote a novel about what he wished the world and life had been like. No one would publish it though because there was no conflict. Everyone was creative and happy. People had empathy and took responsibility for others. Louis Armstrong was on the 4 dollar bill, Sitting Bull on the 20. History was similar to our dimension’s until the 20^th century. Jazz ended institutionalized racism much more quickly, and instead of two world wars, there were two extended world meals, in which every man woman and child on earth was fed. Buckminster Fuller had become the Engineer General and everyone had electric cars by the 1950s.