Hello from Matt

Hi, my name's Matt. I joined a little late. I grew up in Manhattan, about ten blocks from the Empire State Building. It's a modest neighborhood of watchmakers, newsstands, and coffee shops, but most times of day or night there are about twenty people from Kansas standing with their backs to my front door taking precisely this picture, over and over again:

"The most photographed barn in America"

My grandmother was born in the same neighborhood on the very day they finished building it. My family's lived in the city for about a hundred fifty years, back when the population was a tenth of what it is today, and I'm probably doomed to make my life there as well. My mother is an admissions counselor at a preschool, where it's her absurd profession to prepare three-year-olds to apply to $40,000-a-year kindergartens. My dad is a kids' dentist. Both of them love the children and hate the parents. Reading fiction does for me what I think religion does for sincere religious people, but I've been silly enough to ignore it in college and I've spent all my time here pretending to study other things.

I think there are new stories, sometimes. It takes a hell of a writer to write one, but they come along every now and then. How about some of Whitman's stuff about the emotional union among all the people who wound up in America, like,

Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or the
Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State,
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet welcoming every
new brother,
Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they
unite with the old ones,
Coming among the new ones myself to be their companion and equal,
coming personally to you now,
Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

This is only about 150 years old, and I don't see how anything like this could have possibly arisen earlier or in a different place. What is this built on that's not new? Where had we ever seen this before? In what other society could we have? This is how Americans feel about Americans, and for the life of me I can't imagine that it's even vaguely the same anywhere else. So in general, I think all stories start somewhere, with someone. Maybe you can trace Catch-22 back to Kafka, but can you trace it back farther than that? Kurt Cobain probably isn't saying anything that Hamlet doesn't, but I don't think anyone said it before Hamlet. I think when you look back to stories' sources, you'll dead-end somewhere, usually at the great writers we revere for all the right reasons.