after months of silence, this!

it's the end of the workday, end of the workweek, and i'm reading an interview with author nelson algren [famous for writing about junkies in the 1950s-60s], and just found this paragraph so absolutely honest and correct and beautiful that i had to burst and share it. it could be applied to anything, to any life or lifestyle or person or community, not just heroin addicts. he taps into truth, absolutely unfettered --

Well, there’s always something wrong in any society. I think it
would be a mistake to aim at any solution, you know; I mean, the
most you can do is—well, if any writer can catch the routine lives
of people just living in that kind of ring of fire to show how you
can’t go out of a certain neighborhood if you’re addicted, or for
other reasons, that you can’t be legitimate, but that within the
limitation you can succeed in making a life that is routine—with
human values that seem to be a little more real, a little more

intense, and human, than with people who are freer to come and
go—if somebody could write a book about the routine of these
circumscribed people, just their everyday life, without any big
scenes, without any violence, or cops breaking in, and so on, just
day-to-day life—like maybe the woman is hustling and makes a
few bucks, and they get a little H just to keep from getting sick,
and go to bed, and get up—just an absolutely prosaic life without
any particular drama to it in their eyes—if you could just do that
straight, without anybody getting arrested—there’s always a little
danger of that, of course—but to have it just the way these thousands
of people live, very quiet, commonplace routine . . . well, you’d
have an awfully good book.