If Death Is In The Room, It's

I've Been Reading About And Writing About The Civil War Period And It Is So Striking That Slavery Was Never Made Right - [abraham] Lincoln Was Killed, Reconstruction Came Along, And All Of That Inequity Was Frozen In Place And Carried Forward Rather Smugly. So I Think The Burden Is Now Upon Us White People, To Say That This Systemic Inequality Offends Us.

I Knew If I Evoked That Stuff Too Easily Or Gratuitously, As A Way Of Assuaging My Fears Of Not Being Edgy Or Whatever, The Writing Would Fall Apart. This Book [lincoln In The Bardo] Was Going To Have To Have Some Earnestness In It.

The Weird Thing Was That I Went To Trump Rallies Thinking I Was Going To Run Into Militant, Right Wing, Racist People And Mostly I Didn't. That Should Have Been A Clue To Me. The People I Talked To Were Not, On The Surface Level, Crazy. They Were Quite Nice, Quite Normal, Employed, And Actually Were Wealthier Than The Press At That Time Would Have Led Us To Believe. At That Time, The Narrative Was That These Were All Working Poor But These Were Not Working Poor. That Should've Been A Clue To Me That This Was A Little Bigger Than I Thought.

Do All The Other Things, The Ambitious Things - Travel, Get Rich, Get Famous, Innovate, Lead, Fall In Love, Make And Lose Fortunes...but As You Do, To The Extent That You Can, Err In The Direction Of Kindness.

I Sometimes Think That I Can't Do The Bigger Thing That [zadie Smith] Do So Beautifully, As In Swing Time, With So Much World In It And So Much Rapturous Paint Thrown Around. I Don't Think It Would Be Possible To Write A Book On That Scale With As Much Ocd As I Have.