—How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We’ll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for.

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (via colporteur, unicornology, tothepersoninthebelljar, libraryland)