I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories. . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds. . . . One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.
America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.