Slow parenting was given a nod today on US National Television as part of a segment on slowing down during a recession. The recession has brought lots of attention to the idea of slowing down because, while some people are choosing it, still others are being forced into it.

At Slow Family Living we get asked quite often if we started this whole thing in response to the recession. A resounding no is the answer to that question but we do see how offering the tools may have a different place than we originally thought. As the recession continues we find we are talking to more and more people who just don’t even know where to begin. I think those that find the cause because they are seeking out the change are easy to help. A few simple tools and they are well on their way. The willingness and desire perhaps being the larger part of the battle to slow things down.

Those that come reluctantly however because of job loss or cut in pay or just increase in the cost of living, need a lot more hand holding. They are swirling a bit from the whole concept of slowing down, which seems so anathema to their normal way of experiencing family life.

To them I say start now. Because now is the only thing we have truly got. Start by looking your family members in the eye. Start by scheduling a day at home. Start by shutting down the tv and computer and ipods when you are all at home. Start by reading a book aloud to each other. Start by playing a game or dancing or singing together. Start small. And just that small bit of connection and fun will be a bit more than you would have had if you didn’t start at all.

You don’t have to change your whole life. Just change how you’re doing it today.

The sun rose over the distant, dusty hills as a chubby chap in bowtie and peaked hat ushered us on board the Chihuahua al Pacifico Train.  This was the start of our 655km journey from the deserts of Central North Mexico to the Pacific coast, one of the most beautiful and evocative train journeys in the world.

The train leaves at 7am, so the first part of the journey, leaving town, is the best time to catch a little extra kip.  When we opened our eyes an hour later, dry, rocky mountains scattered with yucca, cacti and scrub surrounded us.   A cowboy in a white laminated stetson sauntered lazily along a dirt track.  In front of him lay the skull and bones of a cow lying in the charred remains of a scrubland fire.  On the other side of the line more fortunate cattle grazed on yellow grass.  Large black vultures with red beaks sat on fence posts either with wings akimbo to soak up the morning sun or a beady eye on the passing train.  This was cowboy country.

Hanging out of the vestibule windows we drank in the cold, fresh mountain air while the sun beat down on our faces.  Aside from the rushing of the wind, the outside world was eerily quiet.  Inside it was as noisy as a pig in a tin box.  The wheels on the train screeched and clanked as we meandered uphill, dragging the four carriages from an altitude of 1,600 to 2,400 metres. 

A man with a large automatic weapon strapped across his shoulder patrolled the carriages, accompanied by a handful of private security guards.  It certainly looked like bandit country outside, so maybe they really were expecting a hold-up.  A vendor with a sports bandage across his large nose followed, taking pictures of passengers on an ancient Polaroid camera, then niftily turned them into souvenir keyrings. 

Food and drink was available in the standing only buffet car where you can surf the ride as you slurp a coffee.  At the stations, burritos, tamales and drinks were on sale through the train windows. 

We broke the sixteen hour journey with a night in Creel, a small dusty railroad town nestled in canyon country.  With its tin roofed houses, crisp, cold air and mix of cave dwelling, loin-cloth wearing Tarahumara (the indigenous population) and cowboy locals, it is worth at least an overnight stay.  After a short tour to see the best views of the Copper Canyon itself - views that rival the Grand Canyon - we waited at the next station down the line, Divisidero.  The train turned up two hours late due to pranksters having parked an upturned car on the track further up the line. 

However, Divisidero is a congenial place to spend some time with wonderful canyon views, colourful Tarahumara weaving and selling baskets, and rows of gordita stalls.  These wonderful little maize pockets stuffed with beans, cheese and a stew of your choice are cooked fresh on hot plates on top of oil-can wood stoves. 

We were overjoyed to hear the toot of our train echo through the hills and finally pull into the station, only for our bubble to be quickly burst when the carriage attendant told us the train was full.  We were allowed on, but had to sit on the floor of the buffet car amongst piles of locals, gringos, luggage and gordita remains. 

The train plodded onwards through rocky forested canyons and creeks, stopping at length to let the eastbound trains pass (for this is a single track railway) and juddering to regular halts.  The views should have been amazing as we traversed wild, canyon terrain, but due to the delays the sun set all too soon and plunged us into darkness.  The popping of our water bottles was now the only indication of the long descent down to sea-level. 

Finally ensconced in comfy reclining seats with plenty of leg room, we slept.  We woke at 2am in Los Mochis on the Pacific Coast.  The train was four and a half hours late.  Deciding there was little point in checking into a hostel for only a few hours, we jumped in a taxi and headed to the bus station to try and continue our epic journey on an overnight bus south. 

[This is an excerpt taken from Lara and Tom’s travels around the world without flying.  For more information about their adventures visit www.worldinslowmotion.com]

The cult author, famous for his indolence and libido, closes his eyes for the last time

Albert Cossery was a lazy old sod, a relic from the past who looked, of late, as if he felt he had outstayed his welcome. Always dressed to the nines, this dandy anarchist could be observed sitting in the legendary Café de Flore, casting an Olympian eye over the aimless crowds outside, biding his time. His militant idleness coupled with a strange mummified existence blurred the boundary between life and death for so long that his passing away, last month, could almost have gone unnoticed — had he not been a living legend.

The cult author moved to Paris from his native Cairo in 1945 and soon became a fixture of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés boho scene. His friends included some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century: Sartre, Genet, Vian, Queneau, Tzara, Giacometti and others. Lawrence Durrell championed his first book — a brilliant collection of short stories entitled Men God Forgot (1940) — and Henry Miller ensured it got published Stateside. He even picked up girls — lots of them — with Albert Camus. According to legend (that word again), Durrell informed the American secret services that Cossery could not possibly be a spy, as they suspected, because he spent most of his time shagging. By the early 90s, he was claiming more than 3,000 female conquests.

Sex aside, Cossery never believed in exerting himself. His very name evokes divine indolence: avoir la cosse is a colloquial expression meaning to be bone idle. True to his moniker, he spent his life resisting any work ethic that prevents people from enjoying “the Edenic simplicity of the world”. He often showed off his delicate hands, explaining, somewhat provocatively, that they had not toiled in 2,000 years. And when a journalist inevitably enquired why he wrote, he answered that he hoped his books would prompt readers to pack in their jobs.

For Cossery, idleness was more than a way of life. It afforded him the greatest luxury of all: the time to contemplate — to think or observe — and therefore the opportunity to be fully alive, “minute by minute”. This accounts for the constant connection he establishes between destitution and nobility, which is reflected, for instance, in the beautiful descriptions of glistening gobbets of spit, or light playing upon puddles of piss. The author claimed that he always felt like the son of a king, even when he was penniless — or rather, especially when he was penniless, just like the university professor in Proud Beggars (1955) who finally feels like a million dollars after electing to become a pauper. The lesson here is that those who reject (or are deprived of) material wealth gain access to a heightened state of consciousness. When Cossery died, the French Culture Minister described him as a “prince”, even though he owned little more than the clogs he had just popped.

All his works (for want of a more congenial word) focus on the members of this aristocratic underclass — the holy hooligans who wear their hashish-smoke halos raffishly askew and jump through the eyes of needles like so many biblical camels. Cossery was not just their poet laureate: he considered himself as a fully unpaid-up member of the idle poor and certainly put his lack of money where his mouth was. Long before downshifting became trendy among trustafarians, he checked into a small hotel room and lived off handouts and publishing rights. Not so much because property is theft but because it can rob you of your soul.

Cossery’s anti-work ethos and all-round laziness only partly account for his limited output (a mere eight books in sixty-five years). He was a typical Platonic author who saw his works as imperfect reflections of an unattainable ideal. As such, he despised hackwork, often only producing a single perfectly-honed sentence a week. No wonder his last novel — a slim volume called Les Couleurs de l’infamie (1999) — was fifteen years in the making.

This unattainable literary ideal is symbolised by his characters’ noble dreams. Cossery’s anti-heroes are for ever lost in sleep or reverie, as if they were hankering after some prelapsarian state of perfect vegetative bliss. In the aptly-titled The Lazy Ones (1948), a character remains bedridden, out of choice, for a whole year; another opts for celibacy in order to preserve his sacred sleep patterns. In an early short story, the inhabitants of an impoverished neighbourhood are prepared to kill off those who have the nerve to disturb their slumber before noon. Some characters are even afraid to move lest they should break the magic spell of their daydreams. The author himself revelled in the out-of-time experience afforded by sleep, which is hardly surprising given that what he called living “minute by minute” meant, in practice, living the same minute over and over again Groudhog Day-style.

Time stood still for Cossery as soon as he settled in Paris. In 1945, he checked in to a small room in a hotel called La Louisiane on Rue de Seine and remained there until his recent demise. Every day, he would get up at noon (like his characters), dress up in his habitual dandified fashion and make his way to the Brasserie Lipp for a spot of lunch. From there, he would usually repair to the Café de Flore or the Deux Magots before going home for his all-important siesta. Repeat ad infinitum. A similar case of arrested development can be found in the books, which are all, without exception, set in the Middle East, although Cossery, of course, spent most of his life in France. His French style even mimicks the Arabic of his youth. One of the most haunting passages in Men God Forgot is the description of a crude fresco representing a motionless sailing boat on the Nile, frozen in time, refusing to move on.

Cossery described sleep as “death’s brother” and one can wonder if this refusal to turn his back on the glory days of Saint-Germain-des-Prés did not hide a desire for the big sleep: the eternal here and now. The author’s later years give a distinct impression of slow exhaustion. In 1998, he fell silent as a result of cancer and the following year he stopped writing, claiming that he no longer had anything to say.

For almost fifteen years (the time it took him to write his last book), I lived just up the road from Cossery. Whenever I got home in the small hours — usually a little worse for wear — my thoughts would turn to the “Voltaire of the Nile” sleeping in his diminutive mausoleum. It was a comforting thought, like a sailing boat that will never sail away.

The next time you walk down Rue de Seine, tread lightly: Albert Cossery sleeps on. Shh!

This originally appeared in Dazed Digital in July 2008.

“There is no reality; only perception.” Shakespeare once wrote. If the sixteenth-century English bard was correct, then your perception creates your reality. The problem, then, when you are going through difficult times, is not that you are less successful, but that you perceive yourself as less successful. What if this were not the case? How would it affect the way you are experiencing your career and life right now?

Most of us tie our success to the results we bring in – how many contracts we sign, our income, the number of people who turn out to see us speak or teach, or return our calls, or buy our books or software or clothing designs. Over fifteen years of coaching thousands of Fortune 500 CEOs and senior executives has taught me that the relationship between a successful leader and the results he or she brings in is surprisingly counterintuitive.

The most successful leaders are concerned with results the way a swimmer is concerned with the finish line. If she keeps thinking about how far she still has to go and whether she will beat the competition, she will become easily overwhelmed and will under-perform. If she instead spends about two percent of her time lifting her head to make sure she is heading in the right direction, and the other 98 percent focused on the core processes that make her an excellent swimmer – how she moves her arms and legs, the techniques she has learned over a lifetime of training, the rhythm and energy she puts into every stride – she will reach the finish line before she is even aware of it.

When you spend most of your time thinking about the stock tickers on your screen, or whether the next deal will come through, or any of the other results you desire, you become the powerless child in the back seat constantly whining “How much further do we have to go?” You head down a never-ending road where your self-worth hinges on what you yield rather than who you are. You become like a mouse being chased by the cat of your own continually rising expectations.

As soon as you get the contract you’ve been aiming for, do you stop and say, “OK, now I can relax and feel good about myself. I got it!”? Maybe for a few hours, or possibly even a few days. But then the cat bares its frothy teeth once again, and you become preoccupied with the next result, which must be even greater for you to continue to feel worthy. Once again, you feel only as good as your last performance. Were this not the case – were a result to bring you lasting contentment – then you would be content right now, because you’ve already overcome many obstacles and achieved important results in your life!

The two greatest enemies of your progress are what you call ‘success’ and what you refer to as ‘failure’. The first breeds complacency, the second self-judgment. They also shroud the truth about success, which flouts conventional wisdom: Success doesn’t come from aiming at success. Success comes from doing what you’re passionate about to the best of your ability.

When you focus your attention on status, money, approval or a promotion, you surrender your power. Why? Because you allocate your mental space to these methods that others use to award you for how you act toward them, instead of how you act toward them. You concentrate your mind on what you receive from others rather than what you give. Even a single act of giving fully from your heart, mind and soul will enable you to realize this is the only true reward.

Besides (and more spiritual reasons aside) you have absolutely no control over what you receive from others. It’s entirely in their hands, and depends on many factors outside of your control such as their preferences, moods and the shifting winds of popular sentiment. As Lincoln once said when asked to review a book: “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

Yet while you have no control over what you receive, you have 100 percent control over what you give. Once you make this mental shift, you will finally operate within your locus of power: you can always give more, or, even better, apply your learning from the past to expand, improve and better target how you give. Further, no matter what is going on in the external world, when you concentrate on how you can better give to your customers and loved ones there is always something important to do with your time.

Examples of companies accessing this power are all around us – especially when their customers have fewer resources in an economic downturn and, hence, greater needs. Instead of sitting around and lamenting their decreased revenues (what they receive), they balance their passion for selling their products or services with compassion for the evolving needs of their customers (and how they give to serve those needs). Hyundai, for example, recently created a policy that allows any customer who is laid off within one year of purchasing a new car to return it without penalty. Sears has revived its Layaway program so its hard-pressed customers can purchase its products in installments.

Shifting your focus to how you give to others doesn’t mean that wanting a good job, a beautiful house, approval from others or a position of influence is wrong. It’s not wanting results that causes the problem – it’s attaching to your wanting, and attaching to the results. By all means set ambitious goals. Draw a vivid mental picture of what you want to bring into your life. See it, smell it, feel it. Visualize yourself taking strong strides in its direction and reaching it. But then let go of your desired destination, put your head back in the water, and maintain a laser-like focus on continuously enhancing how you give to others to move toward it. Like the swimmer focusing on her technique and effort, you will be pleasantly surprised at how quickly you arrive.

People seem to be a bit more broken lately than usual. I suppose it has got a lot to do with the overall negative vibes that have been haunting the economy and nature for the past years and now it has just approached us, people, as well. When I take a look around me, it seems like people are kneeling desperately behind a startline with an overwhelming fear in their eyes waiting for the big bang to start the frantic race. I watch them and ask myself: is it possible to win the race without rushing?

The slow movement preaches about enjoying the moment, existing here and now. But when we talk about it then it seems like we only take the pleasurable moments into consideration. The times of crisis we would rather like to supersede, perhaps even try to drown the problems into alcohol, hoping they don’t learn to swim.

But what would happen if we didn’t do that? What if you took those sleepless nights and unhungry mornings or the red eyes and shaking hands for what they really are - chapters in your personal book? What if we tried to experience grief and sorrow just like we experience joy and happyness? I am absolulety convinced that hardships always occur for a reason and as long as we refuse to learn from them they will keep coming back to us - until we get the point or die.* I will probably never forget the words of my bigger brother who once told me: “Every relationship has to survive several ends in order to keep growing.” To my mind I am my own closest and most important relationship! So maybe it is okay to sometimes feel that I have reached a point from where I can’t go on anymore? And then just keep on moving, more wiser and more balanced than before.

In the same way that being slow doesn’t mean idling, it also doesn’t always need be „fun“. Living slow means living here and now, in this moment, just the way it is. That also includes the moments of crisis, unawareness and the relationship that sometimes hurts. These moments are the lines you are writing in your personal book and that your children will read years from now. These ink stains and misprints that you are so desperately trying to hide are the ones that make you special and unique. Just the way you are, here and now…

In the end all we want is simply to find the people whom to sit on a park bench with and listen to the silence. The choice to make is whether we want to get there while running on a fast track or taking a nice walk in the woods.

* referring to the noted marketing expert Jack Trout who was the first to say: „Differentiate or die!“

No matter who you are or what you do, the current economic situation most likely has your feelings fluctuating from anxious and fearful to unstable and depressed. There are very real causes for alarm. A seventy-year old money manager ejects clients from meetings for asking too many questions and siphons billions of their dollars from the economy. Poaching lenders offer rickety mortgages to people who lack the resources to sustain them. Huge public companies fudge their earnings reports to appease and allure stockholders. Worst of all, there is no government oversight to prevent these and other means of relieving people of their hard-earned cash.

This was the status quo, what we considered normal, as recently as six months ago. As long as the dollars rolled in, and we could go out to dinner whenever we wanted, and take the vacations we desired, and afford the best schools for our children, most of us turned a blind eye. Then the illness in our economy continued to fester until its tentacles slithered around each of our lives. It wasn’t until we each personally felt its grip that we were able to slow down and awake from our slumber.

After not qualifying in 2006 for his first tournament since becoming a professional golfer nine years earlier, Tiger Woods was asked what he was going to do. He replied: “Practice.” Like Tiger, each of us can also “fail wisely.” The word ‘failure’, in fact, is a failure as a concept. It makes you feel badly about yourself, when in fact if you’re willing to slow down enough to catch sight of the larger picture you will see it as an opportunity for learning. If you take this approach, what others call ‘failure’ will become for you a critical ingredient for success. Semantics are important here, because they affect the way we think. While the word ‘failure’ makes you feel like you’re on a dead-end street, the word ‘challenge’ puts a fire under your belly to seek an alternate route to your goals. It’s also ironic that the word ‘challenge’ literally contains the word ‘change’ within it.

We now have a fire under our collective belly. We must introduce new practices into our economy so we can be successful again. This is nothing new. There have always been crises, and they will always be a key ingredient in our life experience. To survive them, good civic-minded citizens always pick up the pieces and press on. This is what we did after 9-11, when we leveraged the learning from that horrific event to heighten public security. The impetus for FDR’s New Deal, which introduced a social safety net for low-income Americans, was the poignant suffering the lack of that net produced in The Great Depression. In both of these critical periods in our history, the crisis became the catalyst. It signaled the need to transform a problematic status quo into a new, more resilient and secure status quo.

There is a parallel to our personal lives: when you look back on just about any major crisis you’ve experienced – whether it was a messy breakup, or a protracted feeling of depression, or fear-induced anxiety that left you feeling paralyzed, or being fired from a job that you really cared about – that crisis helped you discover something under-developed within yourself that you needed to work on. No crisis, no catalyst, no significant life change.

“But how can I stay positive when I may not have a job in six months?” I have been asked frequently over the last few months by some of the CEOs and executives I coach. First of all, what’s the alternative? I don’t think you want to go there. Second, being positive tests your resolve. You only know how strong a dam is when there’s water trying to push it over. If you want to integrate any value you hold dear into your character – including being positive – then you must practice it in good times and bad, rain or shine, regardless of the current state of your job or the stock tickers floating across your screen.

Having a positive outlook underwrites your happiness. Both stem from appreciating what you have rather than focusing on what you don’t have. And there is always something to appreciate if you are only willing to slow down and step off the treadmill you’re on long enough to take a look around. Fewer customers may free up your time to diversify the products you offer and develop higher-touch strategies to build a more loyal customer base for the future. Less time on the job may mean more time to reconnect with your loved ones. Being abruptly thrown off what you considered your track to career success may give you the time to question whether you were running in the right lane in the first place.

Find something to be positive about each day while simultaneously learning from the adversity you are currently experiencing, and you will find a better path forward. If we all rise to this collective challenge, we will build an economy that is not only robust but founded on sound practices. Also, and just as important, we will slow down enough to enjoy life a whole lot more.

Derangement of the senses is all fine and dandy as long as it is a prelude to recollection in tranquillity.

‘Here’s a lap-top. Here’s the spell check. Now write a book.’ Don’t get me wrong, I love the Brutalists’ gung-ho approach to fiction as much as the next ageing punk. In fact, my dream is to come up one day with a story as perfect as an early Buzzcocks single. The snag, of course, is that writing — even of the gonzo variety — is ill-equipped to capture the adrenaline rush of music. The Brutalists (Tony O’Neill, Adelle Stripe, and Ben Myers) can pull it off because they are talented, but most people who do the DIY punk lit thing fail dismally. Recollection in tranquillity, not derangement of the senses, is the sine qua non of good writing.

As a result of the accelerating pace of both writing and publishing, much of what passes for fiction these days would have been considered no more than an early draft only a few years ago. In truth, however, the digital age has simply compounded a problem caused by the increasing hegemony of one school of writing (the Ionic) over another (the Platonic).

Platonic writers tend to see their works as imperfect reflections of an unattainable literary ideal. They do not celebrate the birth of a new opus so much as mourn the abortion of all the other versions that could have been. In short (a keyword here), written books are sweet, but those unwritten are sweeter. Authors (and characters) belonging to this lineage have been known to give up writing altogether (Rimbaud) or contemplate destroying their own works (Kafka), although they usually settle for spending an awful lot of time producing precious little (Cossery).

Platonic writers are the antithesis of Grub Street hacks: for them, less is resolutely more. Since publication is, of necessity, an abject compromise with base reality, they agonize over endless revisions (like William H. Gass, whose novel, The Tunnel, was 30 years in the making) or grace the world with a slim volume of acerbic aphorisms whenever they can be arsed (à la Cioran).

In Plato’s famous dialogue, Socrates argues that the eponymous Ion and his fellow rhapsodes (the slam artists of Ancient Greece) are possessed by the gods whenever they tread the boards. According to this tradition, the artist, in the throes of creation, is under the influence — be it of the Muses, drugs, alcohol, a dream vision, or some other variant of divine inspiration. Ionic Man does not speak: he is spoken through (or played upon like Coleridge’s Aeolian harp), hence the cult of ’spontaneous prose’ in its various guises. The work of art comes as easily as leaves to a tree, appearing fully formed in a blinding flash of inspiration or in an accretive, free-associative manner as if under dictation. In both cases, logorrhoea beckons.

The Surrealists’ experiments with automatic writing belong to this school. So do the numerous penis-extension tall tales of binge typing. A driven Kerouac composed On the Road in a three-week, benzedrine-fuelled session after fashioning a scroll manuscript which allowed the all-important free flow of words to go unimpeded. Capote’s famous quip — ‘That isn’t writing; it’s typing’ — unwittingly captured the histrionic quality of Kerouac’s feat. This is action writing that transforms a sedate, sedentary, haemorrhoid-inducing activity into a heroic performance. Legend has it that the author sweated so profusely while typing his masterpiece that he had to change T-shirts several times a day. Perspiration, here, is inspiration made visible, and the connection between the two perfectly illustrates the desire to abolish the distance between literature and life. Ben Myers, whose first novel was also written in record time (six days and nights while facing eviction), explained that ‘There was no heating so I typed quickly’.

Another prime instance of Ionic braggadocio is the legend according to which Georges Simenon once locked himself in a glass cage to toss off a novel in three days and three nights while spectators gawked. This planned publicity stunt never actually occurred, but it may well have inspired Will Self, who, back in 2000, wrote a novella in a London art gallery during a two-week residency: the words were projected live on to a plasma screen behind the desk where he sat. The following year, Robert Olen Butler did something very similar via the internet and three webcams. These experiments, and others like National Novel Writing Month, are all interesting enough, but perhaps the time has come to ditch literary Stakhanovism in favour of the Platonics’ ‘precious little’ aesthetics.

Yes, of course, there is a social angle to all this. The Platonics belong to an aristocratic lineage which is at odds with our egalitarian times (how many authors can afford to be so unproductive?), but that should not blind us to what they have to offer. They write as if their lives (and after-lives) really depended on it. Whereas the Ionics try to merge life and literature into a seamless continuum, the Platonics — spurred on by what Paul Eluard called the ‘difficult desire to endure’ — often sacrifice the present on the altar of posterity. How many works of fiction produced today have any staying power?

Everything comes to those who can wait, so join the Slow Writing Movement — if not now, then when you’re done procrastinating.

This first appeared in the August 2007 edition of Shrug Magazine.

At Slow Family Living, in our classes, we are asked often about ways to slow bedtime down to a peaceful pace. It can be such a frantic time of parents trying to finish up their duties before being granted a moment to themselves, and children grasping to hold on for just a few more minutes before the nightly separation. We talk often of trying to see bedtime as the last emotional fill-up of the day rather than the last parenting task before a couple hours of autonomy or quiet or other work even. Fill your own cup just before so you can settle into the task which then allows you to fill your child’s cup a bit too before they depart into sleep for the evening.

My friend Liz Scanlon, an amazing poet and writer of her own accord, sent me this incredibly eloquent quote in which the writer talks about bedtime as the last communion. I’ll say no more as the writer, Daniel Pennac, says it all and says it best…

“…{T}he ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were little—set time, set gestures—was like a prayer. A sudden truce after the battle of the day, a reunion lifted out of the ordinary. We savored the brief moment of silence before the storytelling began, then our voice, sounding like itself again, the liturgy of chapters. . . . Yes, reading a story every evening fulfilled the most beautiful, least selfish, and least speculative function of prayer: that of having our sins forgiven. We didn’t confess, we weren’t looking for a piece of eternity, but it was a moment of communion between us, of textual absolution, a return to the only paradise that matters: intimacy. Without realizing it, we were discovering one of the crucial functions of storytelling and, more broadly speaking, of art in general, which is to offer a respite from human struggle.” – Daniel Pennac, The Rights of the Reader