On Saving The World

“I know that books don’t save lives on the grand scale. They don’t end wars and such. They don’t cure cancer. But at the same time, books saved my life. And I know they’ve done that for friends of mine.”

— At The Nervous Breakdown, Rob Roberge interviews himself, and it is excellent.

But I’m not sure what to think about this part.

I’d say books have done a helluva lot more on a grand scale than, say, electoral politics (call me jaded.) I mean, haven’t books played a major part in ending most wars? How many Nobel Peace Prize winners are also writers? But it’s also true that most books don’t have a huge effect on a grand scale. Still, couldn’t the smaller effect of a lot of books saving the lives of its readers be more important than a grand scale effect of one big book?

What do you think?

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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