From an old interview that Dawn, Alex, and I conducted with Steve Fesmire, a GMC prof. who was recently awarded the Fulbright: “I think we’ve become anesthetized, but what we need is to become aesthetically responsive. We need to feel and respond to the world around us. If someone dies in Iraq, we need to respond to that person as a human being. There’s a story of that person’s life that just came to a close. If you can empathize with that person and plop down in that person’s life and appreciate it, what just came tragically to an end, there’s no numbness there. That’s why we need art. To wake us up. To rescue us from the anesthetizing influences. That’s what a novel can do. It’s a way of telling the truth, through lies. You’ve got to have a physical response to the world. You’ve got to engage your senses, all of them, as much as possible. You’ve got to respond to the beauty of the world. You’ve got to be able to plop yourself down in other lives and feel with them. I think novels are the most powerful method for doing that, but certainly all the arts are just intensified human experiences that can rescue us from that numbness.” You can find the whole interview at The Mountaineer: Green Mountain College’s Student Newspaper. [Hat tip to Margo for pulling this out of the dustbin of the Internet].