Through portrayals

...In offering here an example of the way that books can offer a humane and individual appreciation of change, I simply wish to cast my vote in favor of a more literary approach. Understanding this human world in human terms is no small or frivolous task, and the role played by literature in that effort is not one to be taken lightly.

groundless supposition

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent,

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

the idea of ‘levels’

'This hybridity is not just one of race, but also of all our cultural characteristics and is one of the reasons why the Scotsman David Hume commented that there was no such thing as a national character mixture in England. Americans, like all other civilisations, including English or Scots, are a ‘fiction’, as Daniel Defoe put it – we are all mongrels and mixes, bricolages and bundles. Our imagined communities are invented and constructed to make life tolerable and bear little relation to real ‘facts’. It is important to realise this before we essentialise our differences, which leads to a ghetto mentality, a need to wall and fence and repel the threatening ‘Other’ who is, in fact, probably a distant cousin of some kind.'