The world can misread us, and they will, and they have, and they won’t stop. But we do not have to misread ourselves. We can’t lose sight of what we … - Ocean Vuong

We’re talking about a claim to storytelling. We are taught that a valid or useful education is one in medicine, science, bioengineering. That storytelling, or the ‘liberal arts’, are defunct or fading. Yet, in the Fortune 500 companies, in the Googles, the Amazons and the Facebooks, they’re obsessed with storytelling. So you can have technology, but it’s moot if you do not have a story to provoke it. We also see this in political campaigns. They’re all about manipulation of story. I agree with you a hundred per cent, the urgency of the moment now is to create new myths.This is also informed by Buddhism, because Buddhist practice is so interested in lucid dreaming. Monks constantly practice lucid dreaming. If you can be aware that you are dreaming, then you can also be aware that you are being foggy or ignorant in the living stage. This sharpens your ability for discernment, and the capacity to look at the world more clearly. Buddhism is very clear to me because it is this feeling, above all else – above even the object – that matters. So reading is not about the book, it’s about the transition of the thought, orchestrated through language, into the brain. That’s why it’s so real to us. I think that’s very true to how we live: sometimes the feeling is much more than the world can support. That’s why myth-making, like you said, is where we’re going. That’s the future.

When I really assess Western culture in how it grapples with other bodies and other ecologies of thinking, at the end of the day, my response is: please catch up. And I do mean – please – because we want you to catch up, we want you to be here, because where you’re at is a quicksand that’s killing you.

...you realize that grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love. And I think, you know, this is the last act of loving someone. And you realize that it will never end. You get to do this to translate this last act of love for the rest of your life. And so, you know, it's - really, her absence is felt every day. But because I'm becoming an author again in another book, it's doubly felt. And ever since I lost her, I felt that my life has been lived in only two days, if that makes any sense. You know, there's the today, where she is not here, and then the vast and endless yesterday where she was, even though it's been three years since. How many months and days? But I only see it in - with one demarcation. Two days - today without my mother, and yesterday, when she was alive. That's all I see. That's how I see my life now.