The novelist and short story writer Adam Haslett is in the middle of promoting a new novel, Imagine Me Gone, which I’m eager to read. This week at the website Literary Hub, he published an essay about solitude that I found particularly moving. I read pieces of it to my writing classes. The part I read is here (I also Tweeted this):

What I believed then, and still do, is that in a violent, distracted, media-saturated world the most needed artistic resource is no longer a critique of the possibility of meaning—mass culture itself has become that critique. What is needed, rather, is the production of meaning that resists distraction. Consumer capitalism thrives by simultaneously creating human loneliness and commodifying a thousand cures for it. One form of resistance to it is the experience in art and life of a human intimacy achieved through sustained attention to what lies beyond and outside the sphere of the market.

I mean, right?

Though I’ve known his books by reputation, I first came to read Haslett’s work when I picked up his gorgeous and incisive introduction to James Agee and Walker Evans’s Cotton Tenants, published for the first time just a few years ago. (Their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men requires even more sustained attention than Cotton Tenants, but both are rewarding. Here, in Oxford American, is a discussion of the works by two writers I admire, Leslie Jamison and Jeff Sharlet.) But this note from Haslett about the rewards of paying attention—real attention—to things beyond the market is a valuable lesson in a liberal arts classroom. And as I said in my last post, about Hilton Als, go read. And go comment below.

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan