Perhaps The Future of the Novel is Poetic

‘Indeed, it is to the poets that we turn. Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaign that prose extracts. . . We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break a line or two and let them open in the depths of our mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters.’ ((‘On Being Ill,’ Virginia Woolf)

Perhaps the future of the novel is poetic because poetry feeds us when we are ill and distracted, and we are all ill, we are all distracted. Our lives have made us so, from gazing too long at ourselves and others. Narcissus. Did he know how to love? Where was his heart when the weather turned and the gaze that had fed him turned to face another?