My food writing class this week is reading J.M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, largely for its focus on the relationship between imagination and ethics. The only fiction we read in the class, the novel has captured for me some very basic ideas about the power of sympathy, what Coetzee calls the the faculty “that allows us to share the being of another.” The Lang Academic Fellow for our course, Marissa Gery, has shared with me an essay by Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” which relates to the arguments surrounding the book, and I’ll be turning to it soon. I hope the class might, too.