04 August 2008

Excerpt from Afterword to "Our Late Night; and, A Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays" (Wallace Shawn)

Obviously society has asked writers, as a group, to take time out from normal labor to do this special listening and transcribing, and each individual writer has been assigned a certain part of the spectrum. No writer knows—or can know—whether the section that's been assigned to him contains the valuable code that will ultimately benefit the human species or whether his section consists merely of the more common noise or chatter. But obviously the system can only work if everyone dutifully struggles to do his best with the material that's been given to him, rather than trying to do what has already been assigned to somebody else.

And of course, like every writer, I hope I'll be one of the ones who will be led to do something truly worthwhile. But in another way, it actually doesn't matter whether it's me or not. That's just a game—who did the best? The actually important question is not whether "I" am one of the better cogs in the machine—the important question is whether the whole mechanism of which I'm a part is or is not one of evolution's cleverer species-survival devices, one that might be very helpful—even at the last minute.

— Wallace Shawn