[Mona] remembered something she’d heard a while back from her friend Vlad, a sixty-something Russian novelist she’d met at Iowa during a prestigious writers' residency in the middle of Yankee Nowhere, at a time when Mona was still a newcomer to the circuit. According to Vlad… peace reigned in Iowa “only beacause we don’t understand each other’s languages, and our ignorance protects us.” To illustrate his point, Vlad told Mona he’d participated in residencies that included composers and musicians as well as writers — and that was real hell. Peace between musicians, Vlad continued, was impossible, because they could all tell who was a real genius and who was just a mediocre poseur. Music was a transparent field in which genius and mediocrity were self-evident truths — and this only ever led to hatred, distrust, and malaise. No doubt about it: not knowing each other’s languages was the key to conviviality, because if we were able to read what everyone else was writing, if we were able to understand it and feel it like music, the Russian calmly concluded, well, then we’d be murdering each other in our beds.

From Mona by Pola Oloixarac 📚