Parini imagines Melville in this book I'm reading. In it, Melville imagines the mind of a whale. A father on Al Jazeera imagines his son, working with Al Shebab. He imagines a brutal murderer, but also someone he loves. Jessamyn imagines Thomas Jefferson making love to Sally Hemingway but leaving her in chains. We are masks and masks within masks and down it goes Mitchell says. John Green did a beautiful metaphor of meaning asked if it was constructed or real where he said if you found an eternal flame that needed no wood or tending that it would always give warmth and light and would be good but if there was no such thing, or if you didn't find it, then you could build a fire and strike a spark and feed it, and maybe that would be worse, but also better in some ways because you're a part of it and he would argue that both gave light and warmth of equal value. It is an eloquent defense of constructed meaning, but I think with a stealth defense of objective meaning. Because we do not build our fires out of nothing. That wood, that flint, that fuel is real. When we imagine each other, we are real, and the things we imagine are also real. We cannot build a fire only in our mind, built out of only shadows.
