Living in the Singular Dream World

Livingston, Montana novelist Walter Kirn has been active all week on Twitter, working through his thoughts on the Arizona tragedy. I credited some of this nervous Twittering to his recent attempt to quit smoking, but it's much more than that. He knows this character firsthand from his novel, The Unbinding serialized on Slate a few years ago. We've become a nation of individual isolationists walking around in a dreamworld of our own making, desperately trying to shut out all reality. We're a mosaic, cordoned apart by walls. The more wealthy we become, the bigger the walls we build. We don't know our neighbors and more to the point we don't want to. After all, they could be trouble. Some, tragically, are.