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INTRODUCTION
Ben Fountain
Here’s a proposition: It all depends on language. Society, civilization, progress, whatever you want to call it: the entire project depends on the quality of our thought and expression, our ability to put words to the reality of a thing. This is a rare and even radical act in an age where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell something—a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda, an alleged means to a more beautiful version of ourselves. Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb out and dumb down. To call it by another name: the language of advertising. But what’s wrong with being, as the Pink Floyd song says, “comfortably numb”? Nothing, maybe, until life hits us with something real, and maybe it’s in the existential moments of our lives that we most fully realize how false most of modern discourse is, when we’re faced with the kinds of crises that lead us to ask, Why?, and that have no clear answer. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” These lines are from a poem
