Across from me on the train was a man who was returning to the same city I was, and who said to me, when he saw the cover of the book I was reading, “There’s no such thing as art. Art is the word people use when they want to suggest that mystery or ambiguity exists in a situation where really there is none.” I wasn’t sure how to respond to this, because we hadn’t yet been in conversation; he’d spoken abruptly, without provocation, as if he’d been thinking of what he was going to say and then had said it. And even then, after I’d had a moment to think, I still didn’t know how to respond.
