I often can’t help but think the reason our century lacks great literature is because we look down on fragility. Fragility is something to be “cured”, discussed with therapists, stuffed away under the bed with shoeboxes and cobwebs. We apologize for our feelings. We try to ignore them so we can be more “productive.” We are too cowardly to look our own human fragility in the eye…and in denying it we deny our humanness. The great writers of the twentieth century, Rhys, Capote, Plath—are masters of fragility. They write about it in raw, unflinching detail. They make fun of those who pretend to be infragile (who, ironically, are the most fragile of all, because they lack the courage and honesty to face the truth.) Rhys, especially, took pride in her fragility, her wounded-ness; she understood that the fact she could still be hurt meant there was a heart pumping beneath the made-up façade, the “shiny, bright surface” (in the words of Virginia Woolf) one presents to the world. Because literature does not exist on shiny, bright surfaces; fully lit, sanitized rooms; or God forbid, the therapist’s (no doubt very expensive) couch. Literature exists in cracks, in shadows, on windswept moors, in the broken lullabies of a lonely girl gazing at the moon, in dreams and nightmares and the dim half-light of early mornings. But no; the twenty-first century declared war on fragility, ambiguity, mysteries and shadows; all must be brightly lit, diagnosed, solved. The infinite richness of human emotions must make way for productivity, the human must make way for the automaton. When we say “artificial intelligence,” we concede that intelligence itself could be manufactured. Everything is streamlined, standardized, lab-grown. Great time for science and technology, perhaps. Terrible time for literature and the arts, anything that needs soil and blood and shadows to grow.