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# Fiction in the Morning
- URL: https://www.saraburke.net/fiction-in-the-morning/
- Published: 2019-07-20T13:37:00.000Z
- Updated: 2022-12-29T06:45:33.000Z
- Author: Sara Burke

Something in me has become somewhat cattywampus because I cannot decide between writing or reading in the morning, and am starting to prefer to read, over nonfiction—usually depressing or at least soberly descriptive of the world and currently *[Surveillance Capitalism](https://amzn.to/2XPCegW?ref=saraburke.net)*—the fiction I usually read before bed, currently *[Within a Budding Grove](https://amzn.to/32EpN6A?ref=saraburke.net)*. Reading the fiction over the nonfiction starts the day with a dreamy context. I think it goes back to what I wrote above, where what I’m interested in is the removal from time. It’s like what [Lazenby](https://lazenby.tumblr.com/?ref=saraburke.net) said about philosophy in his “[gun to my head answer](https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-20-secret-teaching?ref=saraburke.net)“, that it, at least to his interpretation of the ancients, was to find a permanent present from which one could seek a kind of refuge from any one given time or occurrence, a permanent present which by virtue of its permanence affords a kind of endurance and allows a respite from any situation as isolated in time.

That’s not entirely what he said, but that’s my reading of it now. And in the morning novel, like the evening I look for something like that. It’s not quite there because its descriptions of situations and relations isolated *in* time, rather than a set of declarations or assumptions about the world that allow a kind of consistency *through* or *despite* time, but it moves me away from the storm winds and vicissitudes that the demand of emotion can cry out for in a moment and puts me—especially with Proust—in a kind of extended meditation within a moment, where we have all the time in the world to go over the emotional content present in a relation and luxuriate in that in a way reality could almost never afford.

Of course, today, I started writing. Which I think is healthiest, like a constitutional.