I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it’s harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It’s the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It’s usually junk. Either it’s junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas. TONI MORRISON on love, loss and modernity.

I liked coming across this on Brainpickings … Elizabeth Gilbert relays the porcupine dilemma made famous by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer — a beautiful metaphor for how we choose to go through the world and relate to others, in a quest to master the intricate balance of protective self-containment and the vulnerability necessary for the warmth of true intimacy.

One third of the children in America are facing diabetes
one in four children in UK are facing obesity
children in Sweden had a 20%  increase of ‘computer-game-addiction’ this summer holiday
children in Syria are being bombed and slaughtered every day
one third of the children in Zimbabwe are orphans

Children being born into our world today are facing an abandonment of global proportions
by parents, communities, governments

love and family and  support
lost to disease and death
or replaced by goodies, and bad food and computers

yesterday – driving through town, I opened my window
to the street kids
who stand smiling – eyes at window level – hands out
and tell me their names
when their mother died

What have these young eyes seen?
now left to survive on the streets alongside the litter and detritus of our urban waste

these are the children of the future – all of them
and we are failing them . . .

What’s the biggest myth about being a writer?
That the artist or writer does things easily. Plato, for instance, thought artists were somewhat demonic – that their ideas came to them out of the unconscious. That is such a false idea. I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I’ve written.

Read the full interview with Joyce Carol Oates on the Guardian