I respect Anne Carson, who was just given the @NobelPrize for Literature. Her essays on Catullus and Cy Twombly were essential to me when writing about grief. But her praise of the “solitary, hermetic autodidact” and the “desert saints who sit on columns” points to the exact dead end of modern literature, awarding literature’s highest honor to a philologist. You cannot understand life from a pillar. Asceticism is an escape hatch. It is easy to preach equanimity when you live in isolation; just as a priest can lecture on marriage without ever having his face rubbed in the domesticity of two human beings sharing flaws. The giants of literature: Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, never retreated into precious eccentricity. They stayed in the crowd, in the taverns, in the kitchens, mired in blood, filth, and daily friction. Literature doesn't need more minds wandering in solitary towers; it needs writers willing to get down into the muck of humanity, to forge brave new words. But modern literature’s fundamental error has been remaining trapped in the mind. The urgent task of writing today isn't to wander deeper into infernal (cerebral) corridors; it is to blaze new paths of writing leave the mind behind entirely, to tune into the stars and tune out the chatter of words. As Dante, who torments himself through the physical filth of the Inferno and Purgatorio, ends Paradiso where his “power failed the high fantasy,” moved by something bigger that scales the sun and stars. We need writers who can do that: show us the dirt and take us to the stars. Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka, Borges, McCarthy, and Pynchon never won a Nobel. Literature has always belonged to the muck, and to us; not a committee.