A theory of transference:

Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you.

A theory of causation:

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

A theory of aesthetic consumption as an ethical, but radically relative act:

The purpose of art was sympathetic consolation: by recognizing one’s own unhappiness in fiction, one could, if not abolish one’s unhappiness (everyone was inherently and irrevocably unhappy), nonetheless alleviate it to a certain degree. So art, since it reduced the net amount of universal pain, was fundamentally ethical—as with “politics,” “aesthetics” were entirely replaced, or nullified, or superseded, by ethics. Just as questions of political validity depended entirely on the individual actor, questions of aesthetic quality depended entirely on the individual reader: if some communication sympathetically consoled a person, that communication was art—to that person. It was entirely possible that that thing would not be art to another person. There was no abstract standard of “good” or “bad” art that could reconcile disparate opinions. The disparity could be registered, but that, it seemed, was all that could be done.

A borrowed theory on what it might be like to reach the tether’s end:

A month passed in the ward, while nothing happened – not nothing, only flickerings. “Green conductive gel dried on my forehead. Weeping.”

A theory of the ineluctable absurd:

We (royal We) appreciate the yearning for a world that bends toward justice. And it seems plausible that in the flotsam and jetsam of discarded narratives – the scripts, drafts, deleted files and so on – there exists some version of a story that does in fact redeem and give expression to this yearning in a way that hasn’t yet reached the reader’s eyes and lodged itself in her soul, but which might, someday. It need not be a politician’s speech, in other words, though there is that, too, and it might need not to need to be edifying, either.

But increasingly it seems that realism demands an arc that bends toward absurdity. Toward a life lived in a vacuum of ultimate meaning, stretching well beyond the effort to set one’s sights on a particular credo and instead to see what can be done with the available degrees of freedom that are opened up or made manifest and to do so with joy and ebullience.

Stories that end with an ex-mayor of a municipality, tied to four cars with 30-lb test fishing line that are about to drive off in four different directions. Stories in which a man wakes up to become a bug – not like a bug, but the real deal – and has to decide from there what might be done to get through the day. Stories about what 100 people said about Delores, including Superman. Stories about an Uzbek spy stuck in a minaret with his mother-in-law, hoping against hope that the concatenation of drones he stole from the Arbiter and tied together with baling twine will carry them both outside the blast radius, even as he contemplates knocking her out and leaving on his own. Stories incandescent enough to lead to a fatwa or a stoning, lest the storyteller’s imagination be set loose and remake the world.

A theory of perspective:

Homer talks about how people are situated in time. He says they have their backs to the future, facing the past. If you have your face to the past, you just look at the stuff that's already there and take what you need. It's not the same as us, facing the future, where we have to think about that [points behind] then turn around and get it and bring it here, bring it in front of us.

A theory of the American project:

A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy.