Israeli writer David Grossman has a piece in today’s New York Times Magazine about being a writer in Israel. It’s an achingly beautiful piece of work, tying together the common threads of writers everywhere, political, geographical, personal considerations aside. Working against an old threat from Mr. Kafka’s world, Grossman searches for and easily exposes the humanity behind the process of creation. He uses his personal story of loss to illustrate the violence, speaking of his late son who died fighting Lebanon. He uses language itself to show (rather than tell) how one continues to move on, to write, to be:

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn’t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.