Joyce Carol Oates's Twitter autobiography is a word long: "Author." True statement, dat. Wikipedia notes that she has "published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction." Her Twitter activity, likewise prolific, features a lot of pretty standard social media fare, including pictures of beautiful gardens, herself on vacation or dining with friends, her husband, cute animals, mostly her own cats with funny captions appended, the recommended allowance of aggressive Trump-bashing, &c. There are also, predictably, many literary tweets, and pretty regularly something truly arresting, such as:
Only the newly bereaved see life clearly--what is profound, what is petty; what is permanent in our lives, & what is fleeting. But they/we must heal--that's to say, lose this tragic clarity & return to the normal state of trivia-besotted contentment.
Whoa! I hope she isn't meaning to criticize someone who watches the Twins every night, including into and through a highly disappointing fourteenth inning in which they abruptly suffered yet another walk-off loss after two were out and no one on base. I think I shall persist with my arguably trivial pastimes until such time as my demise stuns my loving daughters into tragic clarity about what matters. That will be my contribution.
Also, it may have been from Oates's Twitter feed--though I can't locate it now, maybe because her feed is so crowded, maybe because it was someone else's contribution--that I was recently made aware of my new favorite concluding line (there wasn't an incumbent) to a commencement address: Never forget, it's not who you know, but whom you know.
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