Atwood's Tale

Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale has just been published, titled The Testament.  She is 80, and in a recent interview suggested this could be her last novel.  The Nobel Prize in Literature must be awarded to a living writer.  The Nobel committee screwed up royally when it failed to give the literature prize to Ursula LeGuin.  They must not make the same mistake with Margaret Atwood.  There is no writer I know of--no writer in the western world--more deserving.

In an interview for a New York Times story, Atwood said that every time a writer writes, the act of writing implies a reader, "and it's always a future reader," because the writer is almost always separated from the reader in time and space.

"It's always a leap into the unknown future to write anything."

Elsewhere Margaret Atwood argues that writing is "an act of hope," like a message in a bottle.

These perennial facts are intensified by writing on the Internet, which can instantly reach billions of readers, or eventually reach some readers, though it usually is read by very few.

Her comments are illuminating to me in several ways, a few of them personal.  So I have added the quote in bold to the permanent marquee below the title of this blog.  For which the future is largely the subject, even when it seems to be the past.  And the future is the potential audience.