Novelists for many years now have delighted in wry and slightly bitter portraits of television hosts, movie executives, and the similarly shallow. This is because they despise facile shallowness and inauthenticity, and by wittily and insightfully depicting it may they best reveal and reinforce their own authenticity. This, of course, is something of a joke, as the act of writing a novel to underscore your own realness and integrity is a profoundly vain and shallow act. The truly authentic simply live out their authenticity, they do not write about it. Your humble author, of course, is a singular exception to this rule.
Matteo Sepulvicci, A Whore’s Apartment in Babylon
I did it, and I didn’t know why; certainly, it was the stupidest thing I had ever doneI knew this even then, as I went through with the act. I didn’t know why, but I do now. I needed a sin; my father, God, the StateI loved them all, I burned for their touch on my shoulders. I loved them and I needed to create for myself a guilt worthy of them.
I do not think, in fact, that it is so much as you might think, that I was the spoiled child, that I felt unnoticed or unloved. I could say that it was; indeed I have said as such, to myself and I have lied as well to many, even as I played at confession. But I did the thing in private; I made sure no one would ever know, but me; and by that same token I made sure that my sin sat always on my shoulders. I feared most of all absolution.
Josef Cecis?iu, On Banks of Rivers
