“All the world’s a stage” — William Shakespeare
All the world’s a stage. All the words a stage — tradition of the unity, limits of time and space.
Claustrophobia — the aloneness of the self. But confronting the city (as a writer) is unavoidable.
Then are the conventions of conspiracy, coincidence and encounters.
Modern American writing, Pynchon etc, put structural conspiracy connections to give shape to the amorphous mass of the city.
There is also a poetry of being one in a mass. A philosophical issue of the environment and how it affects/creates character.
Most powerful myth for us is the edenic/pastoral with no cities.
Pure naturalism, a lost golden age, always forever looking back — the pastoral is forever lost, a lie, we reduce everything to knowledge.
If you can write about the golden age then you can’t have it, or live it, because you know too much.
According to Quantum Mechanics, writing is a re-enactment on a linguistic level of the energy that is the world.
Setting…
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