The difference between faith and Enlightenment is contained in the difference between D– and myself. “Ethical non-monogamy” as a high-tech solution to the problem of lack of roots (family).

Impossible to focus. While I sit here under the lamp at my dining room table, a strange girl is wandering around the kitchen muttering like a meth-head. Big headphones on to make sure I can’t bother her.

What is the point of telling a story? Nobody cares, not even me. We can only hope to be as real as possible—even going so far as to replicate the fractious structure of thought. And don’t forget to negate the negation.

The main character is always the narrator, who should win us over with the depth of his gaze and the consistency of his voice. The reader cares about the narrator just as much as other characters. The narration of D–, who does not represent herself, must be neutralized. No character will ever work if they are a caricature. Like Chekhov:

What I admire most about Chekhov is how free of agenda he seems on the page—interested in everything but not wedded to any fixed system of belief, willing to go wherever the data takes him. He was a doctor, and his approach to fiction feels lovingly diagnostic. Walking into the examination room, finding Life sitting there, he seems to say, “Wonderful, let’s see what’s going on!” It’s not that he didn’t have strong opinions (his letters are proof that he did). But in his best stories (and here I’d include, in addition to the three in this book, “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” “In the Ravine,” “Enemies,” “About Love,” and “The Bishop”) he seems to be using the form to move beyond opinions, to destabilize the usual ways we go about formulating them. — George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (New York: Random House, 2021), 343.