George Saunders

And so when I think about that thundering of the body, I think of that.

Now, again, it's part of this huge system that you're alluding to.

But I think for the individual, the journey through capitalism, and especially I think in my lifetime, it's become one of increasingly handing over everything to sustenance.

And as corporations become so powerful, the feeling that...

I want to have you read one more part from actually that same page that I think also gets at an interesting way in which you make this argument through his voice.

Right.

Whereas nowadays, folks padded past climate-controlled cases of out-of-season vegetables and fish from faraway seas and meat from animals who fed in meadows under mountain ranges whose names a person could hardly pronounce, thinking, yap, yap, yap, big deal, pork from Denmark, salmon from the Bering Strait, loaves of woven bread from Ferrara.

All of this is my right, when what it was was a goddamn miracle.

How had that bounty made its way here?

Did it walk?

Just magically appear?

Go waltz on someone else's feet, Henri.

Right, right.

I was thinking when our kids were little, we lived in Syracuse and there's this incredible store called Wegmans.

And you'd go in there and it was just, it was like Bosch painting of bounty, you know.

And...

So, yeah, I mean, I'm big into contradictions.

And so the idea that all of that, you know, it doesn't just magically appear, I agree with him, you know.

The part of me that I summoned there was the part that says, yeah, well, okay, let's get rid of oil.

Let's see what happens, you know.