Sound inside

The Sound Inside 8/23/19 12
I expect him to gloat about knowing something I didn’t, but that doesn’t
appear to be the case. I’m starting to get the feeling that he just wants to hang
out.
CHRISTOPHER When Dostoyevsky said that thing about being left alone without books do
you think he knew he was offering the world an unassailable platitude?
BELLA
I have no id—
CHRISTOPHER As the words were elegantly leaving his mouth he could probably see them
carving themselves into the side of some fabled oak tree.
BELLA
I’m not sure there were oak trees in Nineteenth Century Russia. Maybe a
birch.
CHRISTOPHER The side of Mount Elbrus then... These days the novelist has to either be
really good at Twitter or commit suicide.
BELLA
To what end exactly?
CHRISTOPHER To have his work matter.
BELLA
Wow.
CHRISTOPHER Wow what.
BELLA
That’s not at all cynical.
CHRISTOPHER Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Seneca,
Hunter S. Thomson, Ernest Hemingway, William Inge, Anne Sexton, Hart
Crane, Yukio Mishima, and John Kennedy Toole.
BELLA
But only one of those on that list could have possibly had a Twitter account.
CHRISTOPHER I highly doubt David Foster Wallace was on Twitter.
BELLA
You might be surprised. Even the purest of our sect isn’t completely immune
to the digital world. And Inge was primarily a playwright, by the way. I think
playwrights actually have it harder.
CHRISTOPHER rises.
BELLA
You’re leaving.